The belly of Tel Aviv is Shuk Ha’Carmel Market, which pauses only on Saturdays, for Shabbat. No other place represents this utterly food-obsessed city quite so well. Amid the colourful chaos of countless vegetable, fruit and spice stalls, some of the finest street food is offered everywhere. All the dishes that stand for the Israeli attitude to life can be found here – magnificent kebabs and falafel, creamy hummus, a “Jerusalem plate” with chicken liver and other offal, or sabich, a down-to-earth delicacy of fried aubergine, egg and salads, eaten from the hand tucked into pita bread.

Eastern Mediterranean cuisine, whose declared capital is considered to be the metropolis on the Mediterranean coast, is currently enjoying a worldwide triumph. Whether in New York, London or Berlin – restaurants are opening everywhere, offering the diverse regional variations of Levantine cuisine with its focus on vegetarian dishes. And Lake Tegernsee, too, has its outpost of this culinary style: Clubhaus Bachmair Weissach.

Spice blends such as harissa, za’atar or baharat appear naturally on the menu here, for the kitchen team has undertaken intensive research. And it is a matter of honour that all spice blends are made in-house – also because, while remaining authentic in composition, they have been adapted to the Central European palate.

One example is the North African spice paste harissa, which in its original form is very hot. Based on red pepper, tomatoes and red onion, the Clubhaus kitchen team developed its own version, reflecting all the components while being somewhat milder. The spice blend prepared especially for it also contains paprika for colour, while dried peppers, smoked chilli, a little caraway, coriander seed and fennel seed provide depth of flavour.

The harissa sauce forms the flavour backbone of one of the favourite dishes at Clubhaus: oven-baked aubergine, a vegan dish in which salted almonds provide crunch and plenty of herbs bring fresh, herbal notes. But meat lovers need not miss out on this distinctive sauce either – with its spice, it pairs perfectly with lamb chops, flank steak and rib eye.

Aubergine is a typical dish of Levantine cuisine, where vegetables, herbs and spices take centre stage, while meat tends to move into the background. The same is true at Clubhaus: the colourful, flavourful plates convey the feeling of sitting on the beach in Tel Aviv or Beirut.

The word Levant can be translated figuratively as “where the sun rises”; in earlier times, the eastern Mediterranean region was known as the Orient. Today, in its narrowest sense, the term Levant includes Israel, Palestine, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, while parts of Turkey and Greece, as well as Egypt and Cyprus, are sometimes also counted among it.

Levantine cuisine does not follow a classical sequence of courses as in Western cooking. Usually, everything is brought to the table at the same time – in the form of many small plates from which everyone helps themselves: mezze is the key word. At Clubhaus, too, mezze are offered according to the currently so popular sharing principle: the oriental chickpea purée hummus, the Arabic baba ganoush made from aubergine and sesame paste tahini, and the Lebanese cream cheese labneh are placed in the centre of the table with spicy olives and oven-warm pita bread, and everyone takes what they like.

It is the finest introduction to Levantine cuisine – a cuisine that celebrates sharing, relaxed togetherness at the table and enjoyment above all else. A pleasure-oriented cuisine very much in tune with the times.

Because fish is also one of the staple foods of the eastern Mediterranean, the Clubhaus kitchen created a Tegernsee variation with gently cooked lake trout. The fish is served with spinach salad and olive oil vinaigrette, but the highlight is the chef’s dukkah crunch mixture – homemade, of course.

He reinterprets the originally Arabic recipe with roasted hazelnuts and cashews, along with a wide range of spices: cumin, black pepper and fleur de sel, grated thyme and aniseed, fennel and coriander seeds, as well as white and black sesame. Some of the spices are first roasted in the oven until golden, in order to draw out the maximum flavour.

That this healthy and intensely flavourful cuisine is currently so hip in our part of the world is primarily connected to Israel, which has long since assumed culinary leadership in the Middle East. It was Israeli chefs who, from the 1990s onwards, set a true gourmet revolution in motion in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

The country’s multicultural background served as inspiration, with its mix of food cultures reflected in contemporary Israeli cuisine. It is Arabic, Turkish, Eastern European and Persian, but also shaped by colonialism, with French and British influences. Since Tel Aviv has increasingly developed into a mecca for gourmets over the past ten years, Israeli chefs have also pursued international careers, carrying their style out into the world.

First and foremost, of course, Yotam Ottolenghi, who in his adopted home of London has long been regarded as a kind of Jamie Oliver of Middle Eastern cuisine – and whose cookbooks are also found in every gourmet-minded household here. Not least, alongside Israeli emigrants, the migration movements of recent years from Syria and Iraq have also contributed to the spread of Levantine cuisine. In Vienna and Berlin in particular, it can be enjoyed very authentically.

But also at Lake Tegernsee, where a meal is best completed in proper style with a creamy malabi, a milk cream with rose petals that could also be described as a Levantine panna cotta. The kitchen serves it with date syrup and buckwheat crunch – and when one looks out across the water, it almost feels like being on the beach in Tel Aviv.

CHARLOTTE MILLER