Jerusalemites like their cuisine geographically compartmentalized: Kurdish and Middle Eastern around the shuk, pan-Mediterranean cafés on Emek Refaim, falafel on Ben Yehuda and high-quality haute cuisine around Shlomtzion and Ben-Sira. Following in the footsteps of many very fine area restaurants guided by the idiosyncratic vision of a single chef (Katy Ohana at Katy's, Adi Cohen at Cielo) comes Zelda, whose kitchen is commanded by Noa Bichler.

Named not after the video game princess or the famously boozy wife of the famously boozy F. Scott Fitzgerald, but rather after Orthodox Israeli poet Zelda Schneersohn Mishkovsky, Zelda specializes in a kosher variant of the elegant French-Med cuisine becoming increasingly popular in Jerusalem a fusion in which simple local dishes are granted Continental complexity and Continental dishes married to local ingredients and flavors.

The menu, fittingly rendered in verse, offers beef carpaccio in balsamic vinegar, beef-stuffed atayef (an Arab pastry), chicken liver tortellini cooked in port, smoked entrecote and mushrooms with a whiskey-spiked demiglace, duck confit in cinnamon-orange sauce and more, all of exceeding high quality. Dinner is happily augmented by a full bar offering creative cocktails, the pride of owner Itamar Taragin, and diners have the choice of dining at the bar (with a more limited, lower-priced menu) or in the dining room.