Miss Ada – the taste of Tel Aviv on a Fort Greene corner

On a corner of DeKalb Avenue in Fort Greene, in a storefront that once held a restaurant called Martha, Tomer Blechman opened his first restaurant on 11 May 2017, after years cooking Italian food in the Manhattan kitchens of Gramercy Tavern, Maialino and Mario Batali's Lupa. He called it Miss Ada, a play on misada, the Hebrew word for restaurant, whose root seuda speaks of gathering at the table with family and friends. It holds a MICHELIN Bib Gourmand, the guide's mark for honest cooking at a fair price, earned by a kitchen that turns Israeli street food and Mediterranean mezze into something sharper than the room's easy, neighbourhood manner suggests. Today it still packs out most nights on one of Fort Greene's busiest restaurant stretches, serving dinner, weekend brunch and, in the warmer months, herbs cut straight from its own backyard garden.

01The room and the garden

Miss Ada sits at 184 DeKalb Avenue at Carlton Street, a short walk from Fort Greene Park, in a dining room the chef built to feel like a market — open to the kitchen, stacked with fresh vegetables, nothing hidden behind a pass. The backyard garden supplies fresh herbs for both plates and cocktails once the weather turns warm, and the back patio behind it is fully enclosed and heated, so dinner there stays comfortable even in the depths of a Brooklyn winter.

The wine list leans toward natural, organic and biodynamic producers, chosen to sit alongside the smoke, citrus and tahini of the menu rather than compete with it.

02The chef

Tomer Blechman was born in Ra'anana, near Tel Aviv, and before he ever ran a kitchen he studied alternative medicine in Israel, drawn to shiatsu and acupuncture as a way of healing people. He moved to Brooklyn in 2006 intending to practise acupuncture there; when his Israeli certification wasn't recognised in the United States, he turned to cooking instead, training at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park and then in the kitchens of Gramercy Tavern, Maialino, Mario Batali's Lupa and Bar Bolonat. His grandmother, a baker he still cites as his biggest influence, taught him to cook long before any of that.

Insider tip

Reservations via Resy, open 14 days ahead; larger parties booked by email up to two months out.

Blechman describes building Miss Ada himself, almost by hand, in 2017. It worked well enough that he has since opened Nili, a cafe in Carroll Gardens, in 2020; Theodora, a wood- and charcoal-fired fish restaurant on Greene Avenue, in February 2024; and Thea, a bakery with a Mexican-Israeli bent, later that year — all within two blocks of the original, forming a small cluster of Israeli cooking in Fort Greene.

03The cooking

The kitchen calls itself modern Mediterranean, but the backbone is unmistakably Israeli, with Moroccan, Iraqi and Russian-Jewish notes folded in — the flavours, Blechman says, of a childhood in a small, mixed community outside Tel Aviv. Dishes are built for sharing: hummus masabaha, warm chickpeas in tahini, arrives topped with lamb shawarma, sautéed chicken liver or merguez and a slick of harissa; crudo and ceviche change with the fish market; skewers come off a small, famously hard-working kitchen stacked with vegetables, grains and char. Blechman still describes his old training in shiatsu as part of how he cooks, aiming for food that is generous but not heavy.

04What to order

Start with the whipped ricotta, brown butter, honey and sage, or the labne with za'atar and olive oil, before moving to the hummus masabaha topped with lamb shawarma, amba and harissa. The za'atar-crusted salmon comes with labne, charred shallots and Japanese eggplant; the octopus is paired with eggplant purée, charred peppers and Castelvetrano olives; and the whole branzino, priced by the market, arrives with a market salad, charmoula and lemon. At weekend brunch, the malawach — a savoury pancake with egg, tomato and schug — and the shakshuka with poached egg, goat cheese and schug are the dishes regulars order without looking at the rest of the card.

05When to go and booking

Miss Ada serves dinner Tuesday to Thursday from 5.30pm to 10pm, Friday and Saturday from 5pm to 10pm, and Sunday from 5pm to 9pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 2.30pm. Reservations run through Resy and open fourteen days ahead at 9am for parties of two to six; most tables can be booked, though walk-in space is mostly at the bar, where a waitlist operates once seats fill. Larger groups of seven to twenty can be booked with a set menu up to two months in advance by emailing the restaurant directly.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.