More of this, please: Israeli brunch at Baladi Berkshires
Sometimes I think South County in the Berkshires has all the fun, at least when it comes to food and drink. They’ve got the best inland sushi restaurant in the state, a noodle joint with kickass curry puffs, and even a top-notch cocktail bar.
Residents will soon have one more reason to gloat when Báladi Berkshires, which serves excellent, satisfying Israeli foods, opens this summer in the Egremont Barn & Inn.
I visited Báladi Berkshires earlier this year, when it was located inside the Apple Tree Inn in Lenox, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Hagai Avrahami, the chef behind the restaurant (Báladi means, roughly, “of my land” in Arabic), makes everything—including the breads and other baked goods—on-premise, using mostly local, sustainably grown foods. His wife, Adi Talby, is the front-of-house guru, with a warm, genuinely approach that regional restaurants sometimes lack.
The menu at Báladi Berkshires’s Lenox location wasn’t huge, but it didn’t need to be. The chef prepares a variety of flavorful, well-known Israeli breakfast and lunch foods like shakshuka, sabich, and bourekas, plus salads and deceptively filling desserts. I was especially taken with the bourekas, with their crisp, flaky shells, smooth cheese filling, and sprinking of sesame seeds, and with the just-sweet-enough poppy seed babka.
I’m eager to see if the new Egremont location sticks to its established formula, or expands on it. According to a recent Facebook post, they’re billing themselves as a “Mediterranean breakfast-lunch restaurant,” so there’s probably room to play with the original concept.
Until the new Báladi Berkshires opens, stop by their food truck, parked outside the Egremont Barn, Wednesday through Sunday staring at 5:00 p.m. We’ll create an update after they launch.
