Saka Ba

Saka Ba opened in January 2025 on Zevulun Street, in the stretch of Florentin that runs up to Levinsky Market, and it arrived inside one of the busiest waves of Japanese openings Tel Aviv has seen — Gaijin, Wabi, Koko Neko and Ikari all within roughly a year. What sets Saka Ba apart from that crowd is that it isn’t trying to be a destination restaurant. It’s a neighbourhood izakaya: a small Japanese drinking spot built around a bar, with low backless stools scattered around it and a few seats outside. The name itself is a compound — saka from sake, ba from basho, the word for a liquor shop.

The man behind it is Assaf Menachem, owner of the long-running Tel Aviv restaurant Mententen, who lived in Osaka for fifteen years. He is married to a Japanese woman, speaks the language, and built Saka Ba as a small sibling to Mententen rather than a trend-chasing follow-up. During his years in Osaka he met a chef known as Masaya, who had spent two decades cooking in izakayas; dishes Masaya made for their gatherings fed into the Mententen menu first, and now into Saka Ba’s. The room is designed to read as fluently Japanese — wood-panelled walls, suggestive vintage Japanese prints, and, in the middle of the space, a glass-walled smoking booth of the kind common in Japan, where smoking indoors is normal but on the street is not.

The opening menu runs to around 25 plates, all priced under 70 NIS — the izakaya logic of small, accessible dishes meant to be shared over drinks. Highlights include gyudon, thin beef strips over rice with raw egg yolk, spring onion, pickled ginger and togarashi; tori udon in a long-cooked chicken-and-dashi broth with bamboo shoots and spinach; niku sashimi, beef in a traditional Japanese marinade with chive and sesame; and lighter things like cherry tomatoes in a classic Japanese pickling brine. The drinks list is the real spine of the place: 17 sakes to choose from, plus shochu distilled from rice, sweet potato or plums, Japanese whisky and beer, and cocktails built on sake and shochu.

For the Japanese community in Tel Aviv, and for Israelis who have travelled in Japan and want the after-work nomikai feeling rather than a polished sushi counter, Saka Ba is a genuinely unusual fit — an everyday Osaka bar dropped into Florentin. It opens evenings, with a Friday lunch slot as well; seating is first-come, first-served and the room is small, so going early or off-peak helps. Follow @saka_ba_tlv for hours and menu updates.

Read our full review