Gault-Millau guide offers glimpse of Israeli cuisine

"We've tried to include the unusual in this guide, with the addition, for instance, of hunting lodges specializing in game, farm-restaurants serving their own goat cheese, as well as several marvelous new restaurants that have sprung up in private homes in Arab villages," she said.

The Gault-Millau Israel guide is an especially important landmark because for many years food in Israel was considered by many sophisticates to be, at best, "average." Its cuisine consisted of a bland blend of warmed-over Eastern European with Middle Eastern fast food and the occasional mediocre foreign eatery.

Early in the 1980s, however, a new wave of Israeli chefs -- trained locally and internationally -- began exchanging the flavors of the diaspora for a return to Israel's basics: the tastes, ingredients, herbs, oils and spices indigenous to the Land of Israel.

By fusing these with their own creativity -- as well as new cooking influences from France, Italy and California -- Israeli chefs have brought the food served in Israel's best restaurants to the forefront of the latest wave of "new" cooking: Med-Rim Cuisine.

While hundreds of Israeli restaurants are rated in the guide, 14 restaurants won Gault-Milau's top 14- and 13-Toque ratings.

The four recipients of the 14-Toque awards are Arkadia and Mishkenot Shaananim in Jerusalem, and, in Tel Aviv, Keren and Kapot Tmarim.

Ten restaurants received the 13-Toque award.