For the place
Efendi Hotel
Acre · Israel
Acre is one of the oldest ports on this coast, a walled town the Crusaders held and the Ottomans made grand, and the Efendi sits deep inside it, a short walk from the lighthouse and the sea wall. It is two houses rather than one. The northern building went up in the eighteenth century and was known simply as the Palace; a second stood beside it; a bridge now ties them together. Uri Jeremias, the chef behind the Uri Buri fish restaurant a few steps away, spent years putting them back, stone by stone and lintel by lintel, until the plaster and the painted ceilings looked as they had under the old merchant families.
The kitchen that matters here is Uri Buri, the seafood restaurant that made Jeremias's name and draws people north to Acre for its own sake. Fish comes in from the boats and is cooked plainly and well, with a long list of Israeli wines to follow. Back at the hotel the eating is quieter. There is a generous breakfast, and a wine bar set into the vaulted Crusader cellar beneath the rooms, some nine hundred years old, where the sommelier pours in the cool and the dark.
Twelve rooms, four to a floor around a shared sitting room, and no two the same. The ones to ask for face the sea; several keep their Ottoman ceilings, repainted by restorers brought from Venice, under plaster that rises as high as six metres. There is a four-hundred-year-old hammam for the steam, and a roof that opens onto the whole bay, from Rosh Hanikra down to the grey shoulder of Carmel. What Acre had lacked was somewhere to stay that took its own history seriously. The Efendi is that place, a piece of the old city given its rooms back.
