Our food critic is impressed by the staff, ambience and flavourful dishes at this Rathmines spot
Decorations at Bethlehem in Rathmines give a sense of what it would be like if you were eating in Palestine. Picture: Gerry Mooney
Today at 02:30
’Tis the season and all that, so I’d like to suggest a restaurant I believe ticks all the boxes — good food, lovely staff, reasonable prices — for a festive meet up. And Bethlehem, named for the hometown of owner Ihab Salah and his family, seems an apposite restaurant to visit this December. Salah took over the premises formerly occupied by Shakshuka in November 2021. He has been in Ireland for six years — previously he worked at Jerusalem on Camden Street as a manager; before that he was a waiter and bartender at the Intercontinental in Bethlehem.
Salah grew up in the Dheisheh refugee camp five minutes south of the old city of Bethlehem in the West Bank. His mother, Ahlam, has a restaurant specialising in Palestinian pastries. Because of his experience at the Intercontinental, Salah says that it wasn’t too hard for him to get a visa to come to Ireland, and that the most difficult part of the journey was that from Bethlehem to the airport in Jordan, as there is no civilian airport in the West Bank. He had to try several different Israeli checkpoints before finding one that was open to allow him to cross the border and the journey through the mountains ended up taking a couple of days rather than the two hours it should have done.