My wife wanted to buy some tagine dishes and Moroccan tea glasses.The manager at the Dan Caesarea told us about a shop called Turkiz in Beit Yizhak just outside Netanya between road numbers 2 and 4.
We meandered down to Netanya in heavy rain, turned left on to the road between road 2 and the ladies prison at Beit Lid and then turned left again to Beit Yitzhak about halfway along. We proceeded through Beit Yitzhak moshav heading north, round some bends until we reached a sharp right hand bend at which point a sign for Turkiz was indicated to the left.
Turkiz is a sort of garden centre with a shop selling soft furnishings and kitchenware, including plates, glasses, wind chimes and other garden and household furnishings from Morocco and Turkey. We discovered that it also has a coffee shop cum restaurant serving light to fairly serious meals.
The restaurant has an outside sheltered terrace, with tall heaters, or you can sit inside. We sat outside as the heaters were on although we asked for one to be turned off as the air temperature was not that cold. The menu, in both English and Hebrew, has a selection of the usual salads, bagels and pasta but also has choice of chicken, vegetable or salmon tagines and some chicken specialities that I forgot to take a note of.
The menu has a pasta dish of ' Nukie with tomato sauce '. I left this to the imagination but I assume that it meant Gnocchi with tomato sauce.
We ordered a Greek salad, a fruit salad, a fettucine in tomato sauce, a salmon tagine and a vegetable tagine. The tagines were served in large authentic tagine dishes that you can buy in the shop and were of a substantial portion size. Fresh chunks of salmon and vegetables cooked with a faint lemon flavour were pleasant enough but even I couldn't finish the portion. For some reason the menu recommends Tishbi muscat wine with the tagine. The salads and pasta seemed OK. Dessert followed with mint tea and some Moroccan pastry and I can't remember how much the bill was so it must have been quite modest.
Service is friendly and sitting on the terrace surrounded by rustic furniture, wisteria and clematis provides the ambience. There is a reasonable wine list too and I suppose on a warm summers evening it should be pleasant enough.
Turkiz is open 5 days a week from Sunday to Thursday from 9 am to midnight, on Fridays from 9 am to 4pm and on Saturdays in winter from motzei Shabbat until midnight. If Netanya is a culinary desert then this place certainly makes up for it.
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.