It's almost July in Jerusalem. This can mean any number of things - watermelon season is in full swing at the shuk, the Beer Festival is coming to town - but for many of us in Jerusalem, one thing will be most noticeable: It is really, really hot. Sure, the relative height of the Judean Hills and the occasional mountain breeze means that during the hot months Jerusalem residents suffer less than their compatriots in the Levantine bayou that is summertime Tel Aviv - but when it's 90 degrees and there hasn't been a cloud in the sky since March and the desert sun is glaring fiercely off the glowing white Jerusalem stone, the difference can seem at times to be mostly academic.

Jerusalemite doesn't want you to melt out there. Jerusalemite wants you to have only good feelings about Jerusalem - not a parched mouth, sunstroke and an unnecessary intimacy with local medical care. So here's some information about keeping yourself in the cool and out of the Hadassah emergency room.

• If your skin is any lighter than the fuul on your hummus (not a scientific gauge), and you're going to be outside for awhile, put on some sunscreen. If your skin turns to bacon, you may run into trouble with some locals who have issues with that particular meat.

• Wear a hat. Hats are spiffy, and they keep your head from sucking in an undue amount of sun.

• Keep hydrated. This is damned important. It's easy to forget just how quickly the baking sun of the Middle East can deplete your body's vital water supply. Always carry a big 1.5 liter bottle of water (only 6 NIS usually) for everyone in your party if you're going to be walking around outside for any significant length of time.

• Many stores, restaurants and hotels are air-conditioned. Take advantage of this fact. Step inside. Have a smoothie. Cool down. Take life slow. For what should you hurry?

• If you're staying in an apartment without air conditioning (yes, these still exist), keep these key Hebrew words in mind: kivunei avir. It means "directions of air [flow]," and refers to a central concept in better Jerusalem construction. Unlike apartments in cooler countries which limit their windows to one wall and heat up like a pizza oven during summer, Israeli apartments almost always have windows on at least two sides to facilitate air flow and exchange. Open these windows. Put a fan in front of one. Feel sweet relief.

• Eat an ice cream cone. You are in Jerusalem, and you deserve it.

• Attend an air-conditioned cultural event (there are many of them listed over at Jerusalem.com).

Stay cool out there, peoples.

Image courtesy of noneck from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

That's right. The harvest moon swells, and soon we'll be singing the Song of Songs. The smells of abrasive detergents and overdone toast waft. The bees are a-buzzing and the ants are a-crawling everywhere.

And hundreds and thousands of pilgrims are ascending to the City of Gold, where the feeling that big things are happening is palpable. Schools are on vacation, tourist season is gaining momentum, and virtually every cultural institution is gearing up to offer the best in springtime high art and lowbrow entertainment.

Over at our sibling website, Jerusalem.com (read more about Jerusalemite's relationship with that site, if you'd like, here), we've got heaps and heaps of unleavened content relating to the holiday....

• For our picks of the most tempting kosher restaurants that'll be open on Passover, broken down by cuisine style, check out this article.

• For our coverage of City Arts Encounter, an exciting visual art project taking place in unexpected places all over the city all month long, check out this piece.

• For comprehensive listings of Jerusalem chol hamoed Passover events, check out the calendar on the right-hand side of every page on the site. It's constantly being updated, too.

• If comprehensive listings represent simply too much choice for you, we've whittled it down to the best of the best, curated for your reading pleasure here.

• Our roundup of the most worthwhile children's-themed Passover events should be ready for publication on Wednesday, when it should appear at the top of this page.

• Our coverage of Birkat Hachama, an ancient Jewish ritual that has the whole world tantilized and focused on the Western Wall on Wednesday morning can be found here.

And that's just the beginning. Loads more of Pesach-riffic content is still in the works. Happy matza time from Jerusalemite.

Photo of shmura matza baking courtesy of elibrody from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Just like momma used to make

Don't let the popular Jerusalem business lunch fool you. While some may cater to the suit and tie set (OK, no tie), most of the time, the budget meal option has nothing to with your profession and everything to do with bringing in the mamon (hence "business") to whatever establishment decides to implement the much beloved menu scheme. Nowhere is that more true than in Jerusalem's abundance of misadot poalim (laborers' restaurants), the Israeli equivalent of America's lunch diners.

This isn’t the kind of place you bring a date or a potential client. But when you need to get your snack on with no pretensions at all, these blue-collar hummusiot, falafel shops, sandwich bars and Mizrahi strange stew joints serve up the perfect Israeli lunch that won't break your piggy bank. Even if you do dress up like something other than a video game character to go to work, don't worry, you'll find plenty of your lantslaite also eating on the cheap, something of a Jerusalem (or, day we say, Jewish) tradition. An electrician and an accountant dining together? The end times truly are upon us.

Speaking of end times, just in time for the collapse of the economic system as we know it, Mapa has released a feature listing the restaurants that offer cheapo - as in, under 30 NIS - business lunches, 74 throughout the country with nine in our own Jerusalem:

• Ochlim B'shuk
• Azura
• Mordoch
• Ta'ami

(Not included in our guides but coming soon)

• Haptiliya  - Beit Yisroel 1, 02-624-8801
• Rochelle's sandwich - Derech Beit Lechem 17, 02-6713918
• Tozeret Haaretz - Yaffo 212, 02-5022711
• Morris - Machane Yehuda
• Chen - Yaffo 30, 02-6257317

They haven't added a handy way to search for these establishments on their own website, so you either have to click here or type "misadot poalim," in Hebrew, into their search box to get the list.

Mapa, which started off as little more than map printing house, has made the leap to the internet age with surprising alacrity, developing a number of products designed to do more than just get pabulum into Jerusalem's hungry mouths. The site has developed into a kind of a Hebrew Jerusalemite on steroids, with maps, events, guides, reviews and more and more niche offerings across the land. But do they have a wifi hotspot map? We didn’t think so.

Photo of Azura by Asaf Kliger for Jerusalemite.

Jerusalemite does not care for the word "foodie." It is a silly name for a serious passion: seeking out and consuming the very finest in comestibles. That passion is given ample outlet in Jerusalem, currently in the midst of the classed-up peasant food culinary revolution that has swept the world - but every self-respecting gourmet, gourmand, gastronome, epicure or (sigh) foodie knows that experiencing a city's edible best requires looking beyond the guidebooks, the restaurant reviews and the temples of modern haute cuisine to the humble workingman's establishments that feed residents from teething babies to toothless old-timers.

Sometimes the food within is weird, or at least unfamiliar. But as any traveler who's sampled raw sea urchin gonads in Tokyo, whole late-term-embryo-filled duck eggs in Hanoi or, uh... a garbage plate in upstate New York can attest, it is by embracing the new and strange that one truly experiences the soul of a culinary culture.

So put down the Lonely Planet and let Jerusalemite show you real Jerusalem food with this list of the top five Jerusalem foods you've never eaten before:

Meorav Yerushalmi
You can't really be a New Yorker without lox and a schmear. You're hardly Edinbourgeois if you eschew fish and chips. And you're no kind of Jerusalemite until you've tucked into a pita or plate full of meorav yerushalmi, a dish so identified with Jerusalem that it's named after it. Meaning "Jerusalemite mix," and often called "Jerusalem mixed grill" in English, the concept is simple: every edible-but-unappealing part of a chicken heavily seasoned with Middle Eastern spices and seared on a griddle with onions. Hearts? Yeah. Lungs? Sure. Liver? De rigueur. Spleens? Pray to God you don't forget them spleens. Don't be a sissy. Meorav is generally chopped up into a fairly uniform mix, and if you've ever eaten a hot dog, you've stuffed your face full of offal before - and it wasn't nearly as good as the signature meorav at Agrippas Street landmark Chatzot (pictured).

Sabich
Not so long ago, Jews were Iraq's cultural elite, a full one-third of Baghdad's population, vastly overrepresented in commerce and the arts. Then they were expelled, and made their way to Israel to become this country's culinary elite. Anybody who's eaten falafel is familiar with the Iraqi laffa, a large chewy flatbread, but more obscure, and more delicious, is sabich, a dish either invented or popularized by Iraqi immigrants in Ramat Gan (althought the jury is still out when it comes to the origins of the name). It's true poverty food: a pita dramatically overstuffed with slices of fried eggplant; long-cooked, brown hard-boiled eggs; hummus; cucumber and tomato salad and spicy charif, then topped with amba, the pickled mango sauce adored by Iraqis. A whole rack of lamb wouldn't fill you up as full. For sabich in Jerusalem, there is no better choice than the aptly named Sabichiya on Shammai Street.

Maqluba
First, learn how to pronounce it: urban Palestinian Arabs pronounce the Arabic letter qaf as a glottal stop, so "Al-Quds" (the Arabic name for Jerusalem) becomes "Al-'Uds" and "maqluba" becomes "ma'aluba." No matter how you say it, though, it's tasty. Meaning "upside-down" in Arabic, and often called the Palestinians' national dish, maqluba is a casserole made from rice, sliced eggplant, sliced tomato, onion, cauliflower and mountains of savory lamb (or sometimes chicken). Plenty of east Jerusalem and Old City holes in the wall offer their versions of this homestyle fare, and upscale locavore bistro Eucalyptus is famous for its gussied-up version.

Knafeh
Desserts rarely make an appearance in weird food lineups. As much as human tastes vary from culture to culture, sweet is sweet, and what's sweet is rarely surprising - unless it happens to be neon orange shreds of phyllo dough drenched in syrupy sugar water and filled with gooey, salty warm goat cheese. Oh, confounding knafeh. It's a combination just about as incongruous as ice cream in a hamburger bun, but this Nablus delicacy is hugely popular in Jerusalem - especially during Ramadan, when feasting on pastries, dried fruits and nuts at night is traditional - among both Arabs and Jews. For the real deal, head over to Muslim Quarter landmark Jaffar's Sweets, where the knafeh is made fresh every day.

Sachlab
When it gets cold in Jerusalem, forget eggnog, brandy, or hot cocoa: the real restorative drink is sachlab. Called "salep" in English, and perhaps familiar to European readers if not North American ones, sachlab is a hot, sweet, perfumey drink, thinner than pudding but thicker than whole milk, derived from the powdered extract of certain species of Middle Eastern orchid. It doesn't quite taste like anything else, but topped off with a mountain of coconut shavings, ground nuts and cinnamon, it will let you temporarily forget that the city is 45 degrees, pouring, and a single, unbroken shade of gray-brown. All-night cafe Mifgash HaSheikh is famous for its sachlab, and no winter nighttime shuk shopping trip is complete without an invigorating dose from one of several sachlab samovars.

Now doesn't that all sound tasty? And after you've gorged yourself on Jerusalem's unique delicacies, don't forget to head to our friendly neighborhood witch doctor for one more only-in-Jerusalem refreshment: khat smoothies. Mmmm. Eat well, and stay tuned for more Jerusalem best-of lists in the coming weeks.

Photo of knafeh-making at Jaffar's Sweets by Ben Jacobson for Jerusalemite; photo of meorav madness at Chatzot by Asaf Kliger for Jerusalemite; photo of maqluba from Wikipedia under a GNU Free Documentation License; photo of knafeh courtesy of Tololy Tutunai from Flickr under a Creative Commons License; photo of sachlab by Harry Rubenstein for Jerusalemite.

As far as Jerusalem restaurants go, you can't get more involved than Assaf Rizi. A native Jerusalemite, Rizi co-owns Adom, Lavan and Colony, key hangouts for Jerusalem's hip and hungry. Rizi got into the restaurant business, along with his brother Noam, because he wanted to spend his time in a job he enjoys and that brings joy to others. The brothers opened their first restaurant, Adom, seven years ago, timing that unfortunately coincided with the start of the second intifada. The brothers, and the restaurant, nevertheless managed to pull through, and three years later opened Colony. The latest restaurant in their empire, Lavan, opened last year.

Your three restaurants are very different from each other. For the uninitiated, would you please explain a bit about the concept behind each one? And what is the common thread between them, aside from the ownership/management team? Adom has the most complicated food - the cuisine is a combination of Jerusalem and France. Colony is a more populist place with simpler food, food that is more understandable to people. At Colony people know before they get there what they want to order - there are no surprises. Lavan is Italian and dairy - it's more like a coffee shop than a restaurant. It's a place to go to relax at the Cinematheque (where it is housed), with views of The Tower of David.

Only small things connect the restaurants: our service style; the way our staff treats the customers. There are not things you see on the outside - they're more internal.

One of the elements of Jerusalem's character that is so distinctive is the city's mixture of high-class poseurs and working-class grit. How has this mixture influenced the foodie scene here in recent years, and how has that affected your businesses? We try to connect to both these elements in each of our restaurants. Each restaurant has a range of prices, so anyone can eat there. We have very expensive dishes as well as cheaper ones, so that we're open to all Jerusalemites, from people coming to celebrate with a fancy dinner or people just coming in to drink beer and order a carpaccio or pizza. We want our waiters to treat all our diners as if they were their [personal] guests and as people deserving of attention no matter what their background or how much they spend - whether they're getting a big meal or just coming in for a glass of wine and a bite to eat.

It's not originally an Israeli food, or a Jewish food - its origins are lost to history - but Israel runs on falafel. Along with its cousin hummus, the savory, deep-fried chickpea balls are a common denominator, a food that unites Jew and Arab, religious and secular, native and immigrant, rich and poor. It's cheap. It's filling. It's delicious. It's everywhere. But the sheer number of falafel kiosks can be daunting to Jerusalem newbies. Sure, any falafel in Israel is better than the abortive just-add-water abominations they call falafel in the West, but there's good falafel, and there's great falafel. And as always, Jerusalemite is here to help you separate falafel from fal-awful (ouch).

There is a simple test for gauging falafel quality, which Jerusalemite calls the "paper bag" test: do the falafel balls stand on their own, without their hummus, tehina, amba (mango chutney) and kruv (cabbage) co-conspirators? Is a grease-spotted paper bag of plain falafel just as good as the full pita-or-laffa monty? Just as a pizza could be dressed with the freshest sauce and the finest Italian buffalo mozzarella and still fall flat if the crust is sub-par, a stuffed laffa (like a tortilla wrap but much doughier) with all the fixings is nothing more than soggy bread without perfect falafel. Rest assured, all of the following pass the paper bag test with high-flying colors. Below is Jerusalemite's list of the best falafel in Jerusalem.

Moshiko
Usually, restaurants in heavily-touristed areas are terrible, aimed squarely at foreign palates and shunned by locals (try getting a good meal in the Jewish Quarter). But Moshiko, in the midst of the tchotchkes-and-frozen-yogurt bustle of the cheesy Ben Yehuda midrachov, reliably serves Jerusalem's finest Israeli-style falafel. The falafel themselves are large and deeply green, and with Moshiko's non-stop traffic, almost always fresh. The side salads are abundant, and include the rarely-seen Turkish salad, a highly-recommended mix of tomatoes, onions and herbs. The ability to apply your own tehina from a squeeze bottle is another plus... but the French fries, predictably, are terrible. Hey, even the best isn't perfect.

Yemenite Falafel Center
There are two schools of falafel in Israel: Yemenite and everything else. Most falafel is green from cilantro and parsley and fairly moist, but Yemenite falafel eschews the herbs for a drier, golden fritter. The most prominent Yemenite-style falafel establishment is Shalom Falafel, which attracts its fair share of devotees despite being awful, but the real deal is at the unassuming Yemenite Falafel Center on HaNevi'im Street in the Russian Compound. When you walk in, the proprietor hands you respect in the form of a piping hot falafel ball fresh from the frier - even if you don't wind up ordering. The falafel is delicious; the fixings are standard but solid, and the spicy charif is the hottest and most flavorful in town (as you would expect from an authentic Yemenite establishment). The real fun starts if you show up before closing time on a Friday, when you'll have the chance to cast aside pita and laffa in favor of either the crispy tzaluf or the spongy lahuh, traditional Yemenite breads. Tasty. Different.

Ta'ami
Ta'ami is known for its hummus above all else, but Jerusalem falafel connoisseurs know that its mastery of chickpeas doesn't end with spreads. Ta'ami's falafel is dense, moist and intensely flavorful - perhaps the best on-its-own falafel in the entire city. The restaurant's major weak point is that they don't offer the full complement of salads - you can order a falafel to go, but all you can get in the pita is the falafel, hummus and tomato-and-cucumber salad. Still, it's Ta'ami falafel and Ta'ami hummus, which means that essentially anything else would be an unwelcome distraction. 

Falafel Ovadia
A classic unassuming workingman's falafel kiosk in the heart of Baka. Unlike the previously mentioned joints, Ovadia doesn't shine bright in any one area, but it's all-around solid. Good falafel, good pita, good salads, and the good feeling that you're eating the kind of humble lunch that's sustained countless cabbies and hard-hats before you. And it's definitely the best and cheapest workingman's lunch you'll get in this increasingly upscale part of town.

Falafel Adir
Not unlike Ovadia, The German Colony's Adir is an oasis of falafel authenticity on an increasingly hoity-toity block. Pizza Hut might have come and gone on the corner of Emek Refaim and Rachel Imenu Streets, but Adir remains. At Adir, the garlic-heavy balls and the crispy (for Israel, anyway) fries are made in small batches, so your sandwich is guaranteed to always be served hot.

And now that Jerusalemite has clued you into the best, you should know the worst. No matter what your supposedly "veteran" friends tell you when you first arrive in Jerusalem, do not waste your time at the quantity-over-quality Melech HaFalafel, or the pedestrian Shalom Falafel, or the running-on-nostalgia-and-stale-cooking oil Maoz Falafel, or the simply sad From Gaza to Berlin. When you're in this city, there's no excuse to settle for second-rate.... At least not when it comes to chickpeas.

Photo of a laffa-in-progress at Moshiko (top) by Ben Jacobson for Jerusalemite; photos of other felafel joints by the Jerualemite team.

One day in the not-too-distant future, the anti-gravitational effects of a thousand constantly puffing cappuccino steamers and ten thousand constantly lightening wallets will lift Emek Refaim completely above the more pedestrian streets of Jerusalem, whereupon those lucky enough to be carried heavenward with the street of the gods will shower the less fortunate with great torrents of upscale kosher dairy bistro fare. But hopefully that won't happen before you can hit the annual Emek Refaim Street Fair on Tuesday.

What's the Emek Refaim Street Fair about? Well, uh, imagine Chutzot HaYotzer...good...and then imagine it smaller in scale and taking place on Emek Refaim. The Emek, as nobody should ever call it, will be lined with dozens of local artists displaying and selling their pieces, including paintings, pottery and glass works, with avant-garde assists by the Hagigit collective, who will be taking photographs of the merriment around them, futzing with them on computers and then displaying them on a giant screen. Meta.

Then there are, of course, the bands: homegrown Balkan-booty-stomping brass band Marsh Dondurma and that band they get for every festival in the city, Ethnika, as well as some lesser names. Oh yeah, and fire dancers.

And if all that art and photo-twiddling and Balkan brass and fire-twirling makes you want to get a burn on, stop at one of several wine stalls for a glass or four of the red (or white, or...pink) stuff. Sop that up by stopping in any one of the many, many, many restaurants lining the street, all of which are running festival-only discounts. It's the cheapest mountainous Mediterranean salad money can buy!

Festivities last from 17:00 until the decadent hour of 23:00, and entrance is blissfully free.

Photo courtesy of the Merkaz Tarbut HaAmim.

The Marzipan Bakery's uber-chocolaty rugelach have been known to cause traffic jams on Agrippas St. as first-year yeshiva students crowd around to buy the treats for themselves, for their friends, for the people who tolerate them for Shabbat. While the rugelach are the bakery's main draw, especially amongst the Anglo crowd, Marzipan is a Jerusalem institution. Jerusalemite talked with Itzik Ozarko, the man behind the magic at the Marzipan Bakery.

Many proprietors of shops in the shuk are part of families with strong ties to Nachlaot. What's your connection to this neighborhood and what are your feelings on how it has been changing? My father, who moved to Israel from Turkey as a young child, opened Marzipan in Machane Yehuda in 1986 after learning the trade from some of Israel's finest bakers. Today, he's retired and I run the business with my brother. I'm in charge of the baking, and my brother does the business side. Our family also has strong ties in the neighborhood, and I've lived in Nachlaot for many years.

Regarding the changes, I think that both the neighborhood and the shuk are finally getting what they deserve: lots of honor, fame and glory. Nachlaot is famous, and it deserves to be famous. There are artists living there, government people. People used to run away from Nachlaot, and now they're running to it.

Machane Yehuda also deserves its fame. It used to be a simple place, and now it's getting fancy, as it deserves to. The vendors there work hard for their money - they work from early in the morning until late at night. They work on holidays when everyone else has off, they work on Fridays on erev chag (holiday eves) all the time. These people are the salt of earth, and the time has come when Jerusalemites have begun searching out the truth, searching out people like the vendors at Machane Yehuda. We're beginning to value not just the people who work in hi-tech and computers but simple hard workers.

In the English language, many brand names are so strong that they have become synonymous with their product categories over time - Band Aid, Kleenex and Xerox come to mind. Your rugelach are so popular, that many - especially English speakers who don't know what marzipan is - refer to them as marzipan. How do you feel about this? What's a good way to distinguish between actual marzipan and your bakery's rugelach? This sounds funny, but it's true. We used to think Americans called the rugelach marzipan because they thought there was a trace of marzipan in the rugelach. At first, we tried to correct this misunderstanding, but it didn't work, and there's nothing we can do it. Even though most Americans don't even like actual marzipan, they like to call our rugelach marzipan and not rugleach. At least now we know what they are talking about. If someone comes and orders marzipan, we give them rugelach.

Multinational pizza chains and the third world aside, it's not often that you get to eat your dinner in a hut. But during Sukkot, religious Jews are required to take their meals inside a sukkah, the modest huts designed as reminders of the temporary dwellings of the Exodus-era Israelites, and dozens of the city's kosher restaurants provide their customers with the opportunity by erecting sukkot on their sidewalk space or in their courtyards. The profusion of sukkot may clog the walkways, but it adds a palpable holiday spirit to the city, the sense that a modern urban center has become one big communal campsite. Sure, many of the sukkot are the lame pre-fab ones (Cafe Rimon's glitzy super-sukkah, pictured above, notwithstanding), but no other city can claim so many.

So all you have to do to tap into that Sukkot spirit is visit a restaurant or a bar. And in Jerusalem, of course, there's a sukkah for every palate: Asian food lovers can go to Gong, Sheyan, Yoja, Kohinoor and Corusin; pescavores can cast their nets at Ahavat Hayam and Beni Dagim; Italian connoisseurs are extremely well taken care of with sukkot at Angelo, Little Italy, Luigi, Luciana, Macaroni, Pera e Mela, Primavera and Rosemary; South America get a sukkah shoutout at La Boca, Vaqueiro, El Gaucho and Papagaio; you can fine dine under the palm fronds at La Guta, 1868, Spoons, Eucalyptus, Canela, Gabriel, Eldad V'Zehoo, ZaZa and Darna or have a cup of coffee and a light lunch at Cafe Rimon, Cup o' Joe, Cafe B'Gina, Tmol Shilshom, the Ticho House, Masaryk, or Simone; and you can get a plate of honest Israeli workingman's food in a sukkah at Rachmo, any of the Marvad Haksamim locations, Hamishpacha and Hatagine. And that isn't all. Keep your eyes peeled - in a city where even Burger King has a sukkah, you're bound to be surprised (say, by Nachlaot bar Slow Moshe's Sukkot shanty).

And don't forget to keep checking Jerusalemite over the course of Chol HaMoed - we'll be bringing you full coverage of the holiday, its events and its cultural phenomena as well as an extra-special photo essay of the city's finest neighborhood sukkot (it's as close as Jews can come to driving around to check out Christmas lights).

Chag sameach!

Photo of Cafe Rimon's highly decorated 2007 sukkah by Ben Jacobson for Jerusalemite.