Live Like An Ottoman Pasha In Israel's Hotel Efendi

For the last twenty years Acre – Israel's ancient harbor town on the northern tip of the Haifa littoral – has been most fortunate to have a culinary bastion grown within it under the generous hand of Chef Uri Jerimias. His restaurant, Uri Buri, has become a must-do destination on the bucket list of any serious gastronome on the hunt in Israel. Given Israel's talented chefs and their world-beating creativity with spectacular local ingredients, that's saying something. Chef Jerimias' wisdom and simplicity at the stove – and the breadth of Acre's fish market, which supplies most of the country – shows brilliantly in his ceviches, shrimp, sea wolf, sea bream and jackfish entrees.

This robust, decades-long performance has now spawned a further hospitable development. At auction six years ago, the iconoclastic chef bought two neighboring, derelict late-Ottoman-era mansions not far from his restaurant in Acre's old city and set about joining them. He's now opened them as the luxe boutique Efendi Hotel, with twelve rooms and, since the houses were Ottoman, a Turkish hammam. It was a six-year, $6-million-plus renovation, which is to say, the Efendi comes by its name honestly. Considered to have originated in Turkish and occurring in Arabic and in Persian, the noun efendi is an appellation of courtesy in the Middle East, translating roughly as noble sir ,or as the Shakespearean honorific, good sir. It's a courtly, presumptive form of address. Behind it lie centuries of tea and Southwest Asian ceremony.

"Naturally, all my friends told me I was crazy," says Jeremias. "Nobody wanted these houses because they were in such bad shape and because they were in the old city, which meant that any renovation would be expensive because it would legally have to be historically accurate. And yet they were beautiful. One had been owned by an Islamic family, one by a Christian family, but they were very similar houses because they had been built by the same craftsmen the Ottomans had brought down from Lebanon. We took the renovation down below the houses to the Byzantine time, which was the original time layer, so to speak. Upstairs, we restored the ceilings and frescoes."

In 18th- and 19th-century Ottoman houses, and in Islamic domestic architecture generally, the stately public rooms are on the ground floor. Jeremias maintained that. The Efendi's lodgings are all on the second floor, arranged in a hub-and-spoke fashion off of three connected drawing- or common rooms. Each of the three drawing rooms is a hub to four bedrooms, all with views of the old city's Unesco-World-Heritage-Site architectural bounty. To reach what we might call the hotel's cocktail deck, with a breathtaking view over old Acre to the Mediterannean, one walks through the contiguous second-floor drawing rooms – in other words, through the now-joined second floors of the two old houses.

When Jeremias says that he took his cellar dig down to the Byzantine, he's not kidding. The five-thousand year old port city of Acre was in ancient and in modern times on a kind of global must-conquer-and-own list. There were four reasons: a natural harbor, thus easy supply by sea, constant riches derived from its commanding position on the coastal road, which was part of the silk- and spice- trading lattice, and not least, the city lay on a wonderfully defensible salient, its own little hook of a peninsula. The Greeks called it Ake, which translates roughly as respite. The Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arab dynasties, Crusaders, Mamluks and Ottomans all had their go at Acre, and in Acre. King Richard the Lionheart mounted his Third Crusade campaign against Salah-el-Din from the Knights Hospitallier fortress here.  Until, of course, a few years later, Richard returned to England and Salah-el-Din took it back.

Built to survive sieges, of which there were many, Acre has the soulful hum of a town that has seen great glory and great folly come and go, which brings us to the second part of Uri Jeremias' splendid offering at the Efendi: to explain Acre's outsized role in the collision of empires over millennia, the hotel is bookable, individually or wholly, with historical tours guided by a Haifa professor.

The fun fact to go with is that every one of Acre's sieges succeeded and then did not, as the empires behind them failed, making way for the next siege and its set of soon-to-be-doomed authors. This unending gyre is arguably the most poetic of the many fine historical lessons to ponder over drinks at sunset from the Hotel Efendi's excellent upper deck, overlooking the Mediterannean, the means by which several thousand years' worth of Acre's highly-temporary conquerors arrived.