Old City coffee date
Research for a coffee article brings me to the 'souk'
This was an Old City coffee adventure with Sarah Tuttle-Singer, my ToI colleague and friend who knows the alleyways and byways of the ‘souk’ far better than I do. I was researching some of the best coffee places in Israel, a Times of Israel listsicle that will probably just include Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for now, and she wanted to show me a few places.
We had her one-year-old in tow, snugly tucked into Sarah’s chest, and our first stop was at the Christ Church Coffee Shop, just across the way from the Tower of David Museum.
I last visited the Christ Church guest house while reviewing the Jerusalem section of the Fodor’s guidebook last fall, and was impressed by the clean, bright rooms with high ceilings and crisp bedsheets; at about $168 a night, it’s a bargain for Jerusalem.
I learned during this visit that the church was established in Jerusalem in the late 1800s by Great Britain’s Anglican church and now serves Anglican Christians and Messianic Jews. It’s a hybrid church-synagogue, sometimes called the Jewish Protestant Church, with no crosses at all, and with an ark for the Torah, decorated with the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s prayer and a menorah as well. All strangely familiar and sort of verboten, and pleasingly jarring to hear the American voices sitting in their prayer circles in the tranquil courtyard.
But I digress from coffee. Elias Mascoby is the manager of the Christ Church Coffee Shop, an extremely friendly local who showed me pictures of his twin boys, now about four months old and we talked twin talk — I have 14-yo twin boys — which usually involves discussing what week were they born, fraternal or identical, sleep deprivation and the bizarre joys of two babies at once.
We spoke over tiny espressos, and I’d already had a cappuccino outside with Sarah, while she fed Baby G tiny pieces of mashed up croissant and we tasted the spinach bourek. As for the coffee, points for the perfectly foamed milk and the selection of milks — although the coffee itself wasn’t quite strong enough for my taste.
But Ilias is just the kind of friendly barista you want at a coffee shop; courteous, quick to brew your coffee and outgoing. This isn’t his first cafe, he also helmed the Austrian Hospice coffee shop in the Old City, famed for their strudel.
“I like to be with people,” he said. “I’m a social person.”
More than that, the Christ Church coffee shop was the setting for meeting his wife — get this, he’s the third cafe manager so far to tell me that. (See the upcoming Times of Israel article for more on that subject.)
And this is a place of meaning for him, he’s Christian Orthodox and Aramean. He likes sharing the word of God in his chats with customers, and that does permeate the cafe with a TV screen playing Christian hits and a wall mural featuring the family tree of Jesus.
Ilias’ customer base includes Arabs, Jews — who enjoy that sense of feeling like they’re not in Israel when they’re sitting in the coffee shop — and tourists. That morning, a group of Turkish women came in and I couldn’t place their language — Sarah asked what they were speaking and they said modern Aramaic — woa! No wonder it sounded a little bit like the Mourner’s Kaddish.
Turns out Ilias also speaks modern Aramaic, grew up in the Old City and now lives in Pisgat Ze’ev, which ironically, is a Jewish residential neighborhood that’s considered part of Jerusalem and is also considered a settlement, established as one of the five ring neighborhoods on land that came under Israel’s control after the 1967 Six-Day War. It’s a primarily Jewish area, but he and his wife like living there.
And every day, Ilias comes to work in the Old City.
“It gives me a good feeling to work here,” he said. “Sometimes you get tired of it all, but you keep on going. Make the next coffee.”
Christ Church Coffee Shop, 55 The Armenian Patriarchate Street, Old City
Love your work !!
Waiting for future installments!