Content area
Full Text
A vegan restaurant with a menu and an agenda, Salon Mazal offers much food for thought
Anarchists with experience know that plotting the next revolution requires energy. It is perhaps for this reason that Tel Aviv's Salon Mazal has opted for an in-house restaurant and bar that serves good, inexpensive vegan meals.
Pictures of ape heads with electrodes welded to their brains and flyers of bloodied chickens, however, don't seem to phase the handful of diners munching away on noodles loaded with tofu chunks.
Some Tel Aviv residents may remember Salon Mazal from Rehov Montefiore off Allenby.
Two years ago, the bookshop, library, and meeting ground for some of the country's most prolific activists picked up and moved to the homier locale on a quiet cul-de- sac seconds away from the frenetic King George bargain- basement shopping zone and minutes away from the fashion maven's Rehov Sheinkin.
For those who hanker for university campus-style activism and anti-establishment activities, Salon Mazal's collective offers one of Israel's very few pit stops where all this is happening under one roof.
At the newer location, Salon Mazal has doubled in size - half of the shop is the vegan bar and a free Linux-based computing and surfing galley that serves groups of activists who converge daily; the other half is an alternative literature bookstore and library.
For a small fee, locals are invited to partake in the library, which offers reading material on how to be a woman pirate up to more modest endeavors such as growing one's own organic vegetable garden. Literature runs the full gamut expected in an anarchist/ activist's playground. Subjects include feminism, globalization, and the environment. Of the thousands of books, about half are in English.
Books for sale are mostly...