A little to dream, a little to imagine, a lot to make come true

If reality provides us with roughness and distress, suffocation and tears, what is left besides dreaming a little, and imagining?

On Allenby, on a Friday evening, you do exactly that – dream a lot and imagine even more. You see with your own eyes this street returning to being, well, a street, and not piles of excavations and a playground for dust mites. You feel in your slightly trembling bones the light rail traveling on it, actually traveling, and not just as a slogan of "coming soon". You drift into visions and see the city and the train together with the weekend and Friday evenings, like anywhere normal in the world, and like the most abnormal place in the world needs.

You fantasize about a living, breathing street, moderately noisy, one you can walk on and choose what to do without measure and without any standard. And pizza too. There must be pizza, and there is already pizza.

Cotta (cooked, in Italian) is the new place of Narkis Alfi and Shai Grabler, the excellent women behind Beina, the excellent one located about 24 steps away, just around the corner. They counted, and their legs will not stop counting, thanking the strange real estate gods of Tel Aviv for the nearby asset, and for the good fortune that made it possible.

And when saying "good fortune", it means opening during wartime, and therefore also renovations during wartime and a soft opening during wartime, training staff with sirens instead of words and building a menu whose basic food groups include national resilience and interception fragments. When I call for an immediate replacement, head-to-head, of politicians with food people, this is exactly what I mean. Everyone else can talk, here they do.

This place begins, launches, as the urban coolness index. It is nonchalant and effortless in its aspirations and its ambition. Money was invested here and cement was mixed with sweat, but it is not slickly designed and does not seek to return investments of millions and millionaires. In a city that has been trying very hard in recent years to separate between its owners and its residents, between those who can float and those who are forced to sink, the sane starting point of Cotta is moving.

This is not a pizzeria, and the definition as a pizza restaurant does not completely match what is happening here. If definitions are needed, and if you crave expectation alignment, you can go with an Italian-Israeli food bar that also has pizza, and a place that welcomes both families (at the casual tables scattered on the sidewalk and inside space) and dates (at the side bar or in one of the side corners) and knows how to be both neighborhood and sexy.

It seems to me that the key to this is a deliberate avoidance of engineered, forced atmosphere, and a complete release to whatever comes. That acceptance alone feels good. The rest, anyway, will be done by the food and the wine.

The menu is small – seven pizzas, nine dishes, three desserts and a brass band of wine and alcohol – but as could be expected from the people behind it, it does not limit or confine, but makes you focus, and then happily and greedily scatter within it. Pizza, by its nature, will be on every table here, but it is definitely possible to imagine groups without trays at all, and still with excellent food, and plenty of it.

That means diving into the lower part of the menu, and into a series of must-stop vegetable- and cheese-based dishes. These are medium-sized dishes with prices (NIS 32–82) that demand proof of execution, and it is fun to discover that proof in each and every one of them. Excellent focaccia with butter seasoned with dukkah and honey. Tomato salad with feta and fig vinegar. A plate of sausage and burrata with tomato "candies", and then real star dishes in the form of roasted fennel with citrus butter and herbs, eggplant with plenty of mozzarella and small stings of chive chimichurri, roasted zucchini with garlic vinaigrette and ricotta that is thick and soft to just the right degree, and also a vibrating ratatouille carousel of pepper and eggplant with sheep yogurt and the ability to mesmerize you even before the first fork.

Pizza?! It turns out we arrived at an excellent vegetarian restaurant, without even knowing it.

But there is pizza, and there will be pizza, and how can there not be pizza. Alfi talks about a long journey toward the right dough and the right result (and it is clear to any listener that she will probably never be completely satisfied with the result). This is a monologue heard from every pizza person who decides to invest in themselves and learn the craft, and a monologue whose very existence is a stamp of quality for the place. Hot dough coming out of the oven with melted cheese on it will always work on you, but there are those you know will work harder for you.

Here, it is relatively thin but baked twice and therefore more stable, browner, with light internal bubbles and external bubbles of blazing oven flavor. On top (NIS 72–94), anchovies and green chili are piled, potatoes with ricotta and citrus, fresh mushrooms with béchamel or beef pepperoni. The last two – tomato sauce with artichoke and stracciatella and a white pizza with prosciutto, mozzarella, maple, pears and arugula – shone even more, with a hot base and toppings some of which were loaded after coming out, approaching an experience of temperatures and textures, crunch and cream, invested and elevated.

The story ends with exit desserts (NIS 42–46) that are mature and moderately sweet, some of them an original play (whipped panna cotta with Earl Grey toffee and pecan), some a take on a classic (chocolate and tonka cake) and some a clear sensation (lemon pie ice cream with toasted meringue on top, if we are already talking about textures and temperatures), and with an excellent ability to mix vermouth and cocktail anchors.

All of these, together, allow you to assemble an evening of pizza and an evening of salad and good things and a bottle of wine on the side, a large table with many plates and a small table with one pizza and a clear understanding that the rest will wait patiently for the next time. A couple who came just to say hello, "without eating anything and just for a drink", for example, was absolute proof of the power of human restraint. For five minutes, at least, until he broke. It is hard to blame him.

The famous corner that drops Allenby into Geula Street has always given you a horizon of sea, and a walking angle in one direction, until your feet touch the sand. Now, with Cotta, there is also somewhere to return to. It is not a dream, and not everything needs to be imagined. Part of the story is already happening here around us. The rest will come.