4.3

Talpiot Hamara

חמארת תלפיות

Restaurant · Seafood · Wine · ₪₪ · No kosher certificate

28 Sirkin Street, Talpiot Market, Haifa

A fish and seafood tavern in the middle of Haifa's Talpiot Market, cooking a weekly chalkboard menu from what the stalls around it sell

Talpiot Hamara is a fish and seafood restaurant on Sirkin Street, in the middle of Haifa's Talpiot Market, and it belongs to Ilan Ferron. mako announced it as a new restaurant on 13 January 2015: Ferron, a Tel Aviv wine man from a family of restaurateurs who had worked at Nanuchka and Herbert Samuel, had moved to Haifa and fitted out a room in the neglected market with the architect Marta Bar Cohen. By his own account to Portfolio magazine in January 2025, it began as a 17-square-metre room with five tables on the pavement, a bar that was also the kitchen and the washing-up station, and three workers, himself included. It was the first place in the market for people going out rather than shopping, and cooks who worked there went on to open places of their own nearby, among them Pizzeria Talpiot and Milemala. On its booking page it calls itself a chef's hamara, a tavern. Its website says the menu changes every week with what the market, the sea and the season bring, from oysters to lobsters. The dishes are written on a chalkboard and most come as tapas-sized plates, much of the fish is bought at the stalls around it and from local fishermen, and a mullet kebab cut with a knife and served on tzatziki has been on the menu since it opened, as Yedioth Ahronoth reported in December 2024. ynet wrote in February 2025 of a wine list of 400 bottles. Guests sit at plain tables on the street, in an air-conditioned room inside, in a wine room or at the bar, the choices its booking page offers. Friday is the market's busiest day. mako's 2024 guide placed it somewhere between a market restaurant and a Parisian bistro, and Time Out, in its Haifa list of September 2025, called it a great market restaurant, a Haifa version of HaBasta, if you can get a table. Across the street, at Sirkin 27, is Hamarmoret, Ferron's wine bar.