Bar Kyama - More than a vegan restaurant

Hi everyone,

It seems like Donna and I are having a mutual new hobby - vegan restaurants... It's good to find something in common with your kids. I wish I had the same level of mutual interests with Yariv and Ohad. Yariv, my 23 yo eldest is into computers with lots of hacking related experience - he's so much like me and still we don't program anything together, and Ohad, the cute 17 yo little one is now into becoming healthy and muscular - sort of what I was looking for when I was in my twenties and actually am still into till today.... I will reconnect with them too. It shall become my goal after I am done with some 'burning' issues that I have to take care of.

OK - back to Bar-Kyama - located in 22 Hamashbir St Tel-Aviv which means it's in the middle of Florentine neighborhood, it's the old Tel-Aviv coming to life with lots of young people, businesses, bars, restaurants, night life - very very nice.

I visited this place maybe 5 times in the past. They used to allow you to eat whatever you want and then you would decide how much you want to pay. It seems like this didn't work and now they have a menu with reasonable prices.

It's a house. There are at least two floors. The first floor is a cozy place with tables, sofas, cushions. You sit down and get served by a waitress. The top floor is for lectures - mainly dealing with animals rights. 

I ate what they call 'green veggies' - which for me is a normal salad with lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers where the probably sprinkle some oil and nuts. It's an OK salad, nothing special. My salad at home is way beyond this one with lots of greens and a yummy sauce. I will write about that some day. I mean this is a vegan restaurant - surely they know how make a fabulous salad - it is their business.

Then I ate these tortillas filled with tomatoes, some greens and I think sweet potato. While talking to the waiter she offered me products with plain potato - the one that I avoid because of high glycemic index. You see these people are in the business of proving tasty and cheap food - they are in the business of animal rights but they don't know too much about health. Anyway they arrange the plates real nice so I took a picture.

And Donna ate full rice with pumpkins I think, sprinkled with small black beans - quite sweet and very tasty. Good for your beta carotene intake, beautiful skin and such.

And then I paid with bitcoins... Bar Kyama has been accepting bitcoin for several months now and yes I prefer to pay to businesses that accept bitcoins.

Well Donna thinks she will bring Omer over here. I don't think it's a good idea to bring someone who can't appreciate vegan food to such places. 

At the top floor there was a 2 hour lecture presented by Yossi Wolfson about the chickens meat industry in Israel. I was shocked to find out that each year 250,000,000 chickens are murdered just to make the "normal" population happy. The arab farm with chickens running freely around is a rare sight. Chickens are now optimized and grown for meats or optimized for the egg industry. They are grown in horrible conditions, in darkness, starving, cramped together, dying, choking and then slaughtered without mercy. I think perhaps you want to watch the following video for the 1/25 chance of getting two movie tickets - it's only 4 minutes long but I will never forget what I saw there.

Watch this 4 minutes video for the 1/25 chance of winning two tickets to a movie. (Let me know if it worked for you - I wasn't lucky)

It's amazing now isn't it? People think that meat is so good and not only they are wrong, wrong, wrong - they eat it, they make animals die in pain and finally they too die in pain. The good news is that 13,500,000 out of 150,000,000 were saved in 2013. The Israelis, so it seems, lowered their consumption rate. More and more people are aware of what they eat, how healthy it is, etc - places like 'cafe cafe' are having a vegetarian cuisine and tons of high tech people are hoarding in line in front of 'gute food' restaurant. It's good, very good!

Anyway - Bar Kyama is a special place, and it's more than just a cozy and a yummy vegan restaurant. Please make sure you visit my other restaurants reviews.

Aviel.