Israeli Catering

Israeli food is street food and salad, a good shape for an office. Two sandwiches anchor it. Sabich is hard-boiled egg, fried eggplant, hummus, tahini, chopped salad, pickles, and amba in pita, and it may be the best vegetarian lunch a kitchen can hand you. Schnitzel is a thin breaded chicken cutlet, fried, in pita with the same salads or on a plate with rice.

Then the salad table, which is not a side. Israeli salad is cucumber, tomato, onion, and parsley chopped fine and dressed with lemon and olive oil. Around it go hummus, roasted eggplant, pickled cabbage, and a bowl of tahini. Order the salads at main-course volume.

Israeli food and kosher food are two different orders, and the word Israeli on a menu says nothing about certification. Many Israeli catering kitchens in the United States cook a menu that is kosher in spirit, with no pork and no shellfish, and are not certified. If someone in the room keeps kosher, the certification question comes before the menu, and kosher catering explains the levels and what each one asks of a kitchen.

Where it gets practical: an Israeli spread is heavy on pareve dishes, neither meat nor dairy, so it sits easily beside a certified kosher meal brought in for one or two guests. The kosher office catering post covers how to do that without two separate lunches.

In most cuisines the vegetarian plate is an afterthought. In Israeli food it is the menu. Sabich, falafel, hummus, Israeli salad, roasted eggplant, tahini, and pickles are all meatless, and most are vegan. Gluten-free guests eat everything except the pita and the schnitzel crust.

The one thing to confirm is the frying. Falafel and schnitzel often share a fryer, which matters to a strict vegetarian more than to anyone else. Ask, and ask for the tahini and amba in bowls rather than drizzled, so each person sets their own plate.

Three sauces make the meal.

• Tahini. Sesame paste thinned with lemon and water into a pourable sauce.
• Amba. Pickled mango sauce, tangy and a little funky. It came to Israel with Iraqi Jews, and it is what makes sabich taste like sabich.
• Schug. Yemenite hot sauce of green or red chilies, garlic, and herbs. Hot by the half spoon, so it stays on the side.

Most of our Israeli catering partners cook in New York. Bite, a Midtown kitchen whose menu runs well past the Israeli label, gets its own profile on the blog. Hand CaterAi both counts, guests and vegetarians, and it plans the spread with the sauces in bowls. Everything else we book from is in the list of catering cuisines.