Assi Meeting, a cafe established in the summer of 2021 to honor the life’s work of the actor and creator Assi Dayan has been closed and undergoing renovations for the past two weeks – as has Baum, the adjacent bar (named after “Mr. Baum”, Dayan’s 1997 film). The place, which was located in Nachalat Binyamin and was designed entirely in a rather nostalgic spirit, opened a year and a half ago and served as a home for meetings, conversation, coffee and creation – also around Dayan’s spiritual and artistic heritage, many of whose photos hung on the walls of the place, also around recent and contemporary work, or around Just the kind of Tel Avivian life we miss.
Behind the project stood David Tor (Breakfast Club, AKA44) and his group, together with Lior Dayan and the executors of Asi Dayan’s estate – members of the 1st representation office owned by the talent agent Boaz Ben-Zion. The kitchen was commanded by the people of “Lorenz and Mintz”, the fine Neve Tzediki cafe of chef Nili Cohen Mintz, who created a menu there with Folk food that reminds (also) of Tel Aviv of old, the style of Tamar Cafe and Kasit Cafe: salted fish, homemade cakes, simple sandwiches and fresh salads as well as coffee and beer on tap.
Time Out’s cover story, “Asi Dayan Presents: Fear and Loathing in Tel Aviv” on the wall (photo: Assi’s Facebook page)
“It’s not a place you come to because of the food or the design or some trend,” Tor told us upon its opening, “It’s going to be such a simple place. It’s a meeting. We do it for the soul, but it’s because I don’t have a place to sit and drink coffee And I don’t want to go far. And if along the way this wonderful man will be among us for life, then all in all, great. We made enough money in Halat and Bitcoin to spend it on cafes that don’t earn a shekel.” Tor was indeed joking with us (it seems to us), but ironically Bitcoin crashed last year – and the anti-commercial dreams too, he had to put on hold and end this nostalgic-dreamy-bohemian episode called Ace Meeting.
The photographs of Dayan at the location were actually part of a permanent exhibition curated by Revital Ben Asher Peretz, in which she was assisted by his son Lior Dayan. Besides the photographs, there were also scripts, letters, press articles, rare documents and directing instructions that he wrote and appear in his original handwriting, which allowed cinema people to read them and reflect on them again. Dayan’s films were also occasionally screened there, such as “Mr. Baum”, “He Walked in the Fields”, “Life According to Agfa” and others, as well as occasional secular Shabbat receptions with Jewish food on the pedestrian street of Nachalat Binyamin.
So maybe coffee establishments that are free from trends – such as Cafe Shelag, Cafe Bialik, Bacho and Mercand no longer have a place in today’s Tel Aviv, and the Essi meeting was simply born a few years too late (by the way, Boaz Targetman’s Cafe Mercand was even hosted at the Essi meeting after who closed the gates of the mythical Mercand after 65 years). But in the end it is not clear if there is still a place for such an animal in Tel Aviv – a bohemian-hipster-contemplative cafe now that all the artists have gone to become hi-tech designers and all the freelancers work from home. And yes, it makes us nostalgic and also a little sad.
Lior Dayan and David Tor chose not to comment.