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In the Best Bar in the Middle East and Africa, Zionism Is Alive in a Highball

A night at the Imperial Craft, Tel Aviv’s coolest bar

by
Liel Leibovitz
July 31, 2015
Imperial Craft Cocktail Bar
Imperial Craft Cocktail Bar
Imperial Craft Cocktail Bar
Imperial Craft Cocktail Bar

Each year, Drinks International, the dryly named magazine of the global liquor industry, selects its favorite bars around the world. In 2014, the title of most distinguished watering hole in Africa and the Middle East was awarded to Imperial Craft, a cocktail lounge on Tel Aviv’s Hayarkon Street.

This fact was conveyed to me shortly after landing in my native city for a brief visit by a friend who knew me all too well. I am liberal with my appetites. Point me to the best bar in the Middle East and Africa, and I’ll dash in expecting mysteries, never thinking that the first of these two regions is governed by a religion that frowns on drinking while the second is fortunate if it has clean drinking water, let alone small-batch bourbon. I jotted down the address. I had to visit this flagship of libations.

Doubt, however, began creeping in as soon as my wife and I stepped out of the cab and into a corner of the city that was as cadaverous as the residents of the old cemetery down the block. There, as tight as a fastidious child’s dominos, stood the gravestones of 5,000 of the founders of the first Hebrew city—Meir Dizengoff, its first mayor; Hayim Nahman Bialik, its first great poet—who lay silently and watched as their cultural yearnings were forgotten by a town hungry for real estate and foreign thrills. The crest of construction washing over Tel Aviv had not yet soaked the corner of Hayarkon and Trumpeldor streets; if six blocks to the north you could stroll in the evening and catch whiffs of Berlin or New York, the sites and the smells that greeted us as we searched for our bar belonged distinctly to Africa and the Middle East.

Still, the promise of a well-mixed drink has fortified men and women on stiffer quest than ours; with a hopeful spring, we entered what proved to be the lobby of the hotel.

If you’ve read any thriller set in a tropical country, you already know the institution in question. It won’t be too unkind to say that it’s the sort of place designed for sweaty lustful afternoon trysts on the large creaky bed under the lazy rotations of the ceiling fan’s wicker blades, or, alternatively, for accepting brown sealed envelopes from smirking men named Raul. All this is to say that the best bar business sounded awfully fancy, and the Imperial Hotel was decidedly not.

Nor were we certain that there was, indeed, a bar: The only sign of robust nightlife anywhere were the two women sitting on the red faux leather sofas in the hotel lobby and glaring at the small TV fixed to a bracket on the wall above them, bored beyond relief. You could tell by their dresses and their shoes that these were women on a quest. And the object of their desire, it turned out, lay just beyond a small door tucked in the lobby’s back.

We knocked. A man came out. His face was like the sign hanging above Dante’s purgatory, advising all who enter to abandon hope; a seat at the bar is a coveted thing, not some reward for absent-minded tourists to seize and then forget. But we promised to be out by 11, and, after a weeklong holiday with two small children and a battery of relatives in tow, we looked as if we needed a drink. The door opened, and into Valhalla we went.

The people who designed Imperial Craft must have shared my aesthetic infatuations, as the entire joint, though tiny, looked as if it had just served T.E. Lawrence and his mates a round of drinks to celebrate their successful capture of Aqaba. The décor was wood and wicker, the lighting low, the music early pulsating rock ’n’ roll. We were ready to believe. All we needed was a sip of the actual cocktails.

The one I finally ordered sounded monstrous, a pile-up of potions that, on paper, had nothing to do with one another: crisp gin, warm calvados, herbaceous Fernet Branca, shaken with fresh mint and lemon and almonds. I expected, quite literally, a bitter disappointment, the Fernet sometimes having the same effect on the tongue an excavator has on a dirt lot. But the moment the muddled pink drink crossed my lips, I knew that the astute observers at Drinks International were truly worthy of their self-appointed seat of judgment: The cocktail was unexceptionally, uncommonly sublime.

And not, mind you, just because the ingredients it measured so precisely and stirred so elegantly. What the Imperial Craft serves is what Tel Aviv was built to make true, a fantasy of fierce Europeans fleeing the grimmest circumstances and believing, against all observable phenomena, that they could create a town devoted, boldly and exquisitely, to the good life. While the kibbutzim and the moshavim were always abstractions, physical extensions of fiery ideologies, Tel Aviv, with its wide boulevards and its Bauhaus architecture, was erected for human pleasure. Its builders faced the harsh light and the hot sand and the lapping sea and subdued all three to build crazy, improbable things like theaters and opera houses and cafés long before they or any of their neighbors had the money or the leisure to frequent any such place. Tel Aviv is a testament to the triumph of what the filmmaker Werner Herzog calls the ecstatic truth, that deeper stratum of reality that rushes underneath the dry and dead epidermis of facts and figures.

Judging by my drinks—we ordered three in total in the short time allotted to us at the Imperial Craft, all spectacular—the custodians of modern-day Tel Aviv are as attentive as ever to the ecstatic truth of their surroundings. The odd ingredients, the exotic design—only people faced with the toughest of circumstances could be this committed to wild and absolute forms of reinvention. You can’t get this conceptual wildness in London or in Paris or in any other city that could, when adversity slithers in, simply retreat into its storied and soothing past. You could spot it here and there in New York, another town that’s cultish about scarcity and uncertainty. But in Tel Aviv, the drinks and the dreams are strange and strong.

Eleven o’clock came. We paid the tab and stepped back into time, into the mournful street. But as we walked back to our apartment, I nodded at the dead down the block, telling them with my smile and my stagger that the vision of Zionism, always untamed, forever flirting with new forms, was good and well and living in a highball.

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Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One. He is the editor of Zionism: The Tablet Guide.