After 10 years of serving flavour-stuffed grape leaves, salivation-worthy shakshuka and what many consider the best hummus in Berlin, Kanaan has closed its doors. But with a touring schedule, school programme and TV show in the making, its vision continues – beyond a restaurant and beyond Berlin. The Israeli-Palestinian restaurant in Prenzlauer Berg gained attention for serving more than just Middle Eastern cuisine. Israeli chef Oz Ben David and Palestinian chef Jalil Debit promoted a palatable message of peace, from their logo, which combines both flags, to the integrated design of their 12-course sharing menu. When we interviewed them separately – due only to practicalities – what shined through was not their disparity, but the alignment present in their replies, as both agreed on how very different they are from each other, then outlined their joint vision for the future.
HUMMUSSEXUAL
It all began with hummus. So it only seemed fitting that when Oz answered our video call, he’d be wearing a black t-shirt that read ‘Ich bin hummussexual’. He told us the story of how he and Jalil first met. It was in Berlin, when Jalil brought his tahini brand to Oz’s PR office. They began marketing it together, only to hear supermarkets admit that they would never sell ingredients from Israel or Palestine due to “the political headache”. That was when Oz and Jalil decided to establish their own Israeli-Palestinian brand – to save everyone else the trouble. “We understood that we wouldn’t agree on anything,” Oz admitted. With opposing worldviews, they doubted whether they could work together at all. That was until Jalil said, “Let’s not agree. Let’s just make hummus.”
The first time Jalil made hummus for him, Oz didn’t hold back. “I hate this,” he said. “It’s sour. It’s not hummus.” But Jalil didn’t react as he expected. “The most typical way to behave would be to say, ‘Listen, my family has made hummus for 300 years. I know how to make hummus. Shut the fuck up,’” Oz told us. “But no, he said, ‘Okay, show me yours and let’s make something new together’. He had zero ego about it.” That’s exactly what they did: they created an original Israeli-Palestinian hummus, and from there, Kanaan began. It first started as a pop-up, which became a beer garden, and eventually ended at their location on Schliemannstraße.
The restaurant’s 12-course sharing menu, described as a journey through Palestinian and Israeli cuisines, was always about more than flavour. “I come from a food family,” Jalil told us, answering the call from his restaurant’s bomb shelter in Israel. “When you eat food, you learn about the culture, you learn a little bit of the language. You smell things differently.” Unlike Jalil, cooking wasn’t Oz’s main profession. Instead, the menu was something through which to act – the table a canvas and the food its palette. “We needed to put in the colour of Palestine, the colour of Israel, but also the colours of Berlin,” he said. Indeed, that’s how they created some of their best-loved dishes: the hummus-Kartoffelpuffer, the Knödel with dried mint and yoghurt. They described their vision as a simple one: that an Israeli, German and Palestinian could sit around the table and each feel that their grandmothers had cooked a meal for them, together.
Kanaan is a hummussexual place. If you like hummus, I like you.
After all, Kanaan was born not out of similarity, but out of difference – from establishing one-of-a-kind common ground between two owners from conflicting worlds. One of the ways they did this was through language. By creating their own terminology, they could focus on what they agreed on, rather than what they disagreed on. “Kanaan is a hummussexual place,” Oz clarified, pointing to his t-shirt. “It’s a place for people who are attracted to people who like hummus. If you like hummus, I like you.”
Using this mentality, when they decided to open a restaurant in 2015, Berlin seemed like the perfect city in which to do it. “Jalil and me could not have met any other place than in Berlin,” Oz told us. “Kanaan isn’t just a story of an Israeli and a Palestinian. It’s the story of what’s happening in the world, and Berlin was the lab to present that.” With so many different people coming together in one city. The impact felt meaningful – a place to connect to and learn from each other, using food as a catalyst for community. But that was 10 years ago, and a lot has changed since then.
MOVE WITH CHANGE
However amazing your hummus might be, it can’t protect you from the brutality of Berlin’s hospitality industry. Kanaan never hid its struggles. In 2024, when the restaurant was vandalised, they asked for support, fundraising €20,000 in less than a day. In August 2025, when the restaurant faced closure, they asked for help, stating that, “war, fear and a collapsing economy have left deep scars”. And on January 23, when they posted that the restaurant would close and enter an insolvency process, they admitted it openly: “The level of financial commitments, staffing requirements, constant uncertainty and volatility in guest numbers has grown to a point we can no longer carry.”
Until recently, Oz always compared Kanaan to a current flowing in the right direction: “Jalil and I felt that the universe was with us. Yes, it’s hard. You have banks, you have suppliers, but something felt like we were in the right place at the right time.” Then two years ago, something shifted; they sensed a bigger change coming. The menu was highly rated, the support was there, but they realised that their limitations stemmed from the restaurant itself – the passiveness of staying still. “Standing in one location was not serving us anymore,” Oz said. Instead, they asked themselves a simple question: “How can we reach the German people and lead with the story of Kanaan?”
Let’s not agree. Let’s just make hummus.
Change has always been a cornerstone of Kanaanian philosophy: a change in the norm, a change of mindset and now a change in direction. “You can’t really sit still,” Jalil put it. “It’s good to move with change, with the way things are going, and not cling to the past.” A significant change wasn’t only necessary; it was inevitable. What they could preserve, they preserved with grace: Kanaan’s vision. After so many years of struggle, the manner of closing the restaurant felt important – a celebration of the success of the last decade. “I’m so happy that we finished the way we finished,” Oz expressed. “We didn’t run away. We left with our chests high and proud, not like we escaped something.” It was clearly a bittersweet weekend, the end of an era, perhaps even a sigh of relief. “We know it’s not a sad story. It’s not like we’re saying goodbye to Kanaan.”
After all, Kanaan’s story is far from over. If anything, it seems like it’s only just beginning.
NEXT STEPS
This year, Oz and Jalil will take Kanaan on the road. Touring Germany, they plan to collaborate with local restaurants, blending cuisines from conflicting nations, so that “everybody will feel the spirit of Kanaan in their city”. In Indian restaurants, they will combine Indian and Pakistani meals; in Greek restaurants, they will serve Turkish and Greek dishes; in Middle Eastern cafes, they will serve Jewish and Arabic sweets. As it always has been, food will be the catalyst for communication. “We want to talk about conflict, not just between Israel and Palestine,” Jalil said. “For example, Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan. The world has a lot of conflict.” It’s clear that their shift to a movement-based model has realigned a central question: what’s next? “Don’t agree!” Oz said. “But sit and talk about how you imagine a school in five years from now or what your city will look like. That alone will reduce fear and allow us to go into the future, not necessarily as best friends, but partners.”
Kanaan will also lead workshops in schools. Having developed a pedagogic programme called ‘What I thought I didn’t like to eat’, they encourage children to rethink their relationship to food. Sometimes, that’s asking them to narrow down their dislikes. For example, if a student says they don’t like cheese, what does that mean? Cheese isn’t one singular thing – is it the taste of hard cheese, soft cheese, cream cheese? Low- or high-fat cream cheese? Cream cheese with mushroom or chives or paprika? Eventually, they have to admit the truth: they haven’t tried every kind. Other times, it’s telling the students that they’ve found a single food that every one of them loves, only to watch them recoil at a tray of smashed-up baby food. “What can we learn from that?” Oz asks them. “Time changes the things we like, and also the things we don’t like.”
We know it’s not a sad story. It’s not like we’re saying goodbye to Kanaan.
It’s also about daring the kids to try. “Many times, it’s about the combination,” Oz told us. “Maybe they can’t stand pistachio, but if it’s inside of a chocolate ball, it’s not so bad.” They don’t necessarily want something when it’s a stand-alone ingredient, but with something else, it works, given the right flavour combinations. When they talk to the children afterwards, they aren’t talking about food. They’re talking about their friends. They’re talking about people. They understand the metaphor. “You need to let them do the journey with you,” Oz said, “and trust that they’re smart enough to get there themselves.”
The wellbeing of the next generation is a priority for Oz and Jalil. Oz told us about his nephews, who he’s always telling that business, and life, is about failing. “We don’t need to give a final answer. We just need to start something and let the next generation shape it.” For Jalil, the wellbeing of the next generation is far from abstract. When we called him, he answered during a missile attack, and our interview was frequently disrupted by his reactions to nearby explosions. “There are a lot of things that we’re going to do,” he told us. “The problem is that here in the Middle East, we don’t know what’s going to happen in the next five minutes. I have a wife and three children here. One is seven months, one is five years old and my daughter is 17, so I cannot — oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Oh, my God.” Jalil went silent on the other end of the call, listening, waiting for everything that could happen next. When we asked if he needed to leave the call, he said, “No, no, I’m in the shelter… Oh, boom. Crazy. Crazy world.”
TV STARS
In the midst of a bombing, it felt arbitrary, to say the least, to ask Jalil about a TV show. Instead, we spoke with producer Sebastian Fruner of Traumfabrik Babelsberg, and it became clear that bringing Kanaan to the screen will play an important role in Oz and Jalil’s next steps. “It’s not like The Bear or MasterChef or something,” Jailil told us. “It’s about people from different backgrounds coming together to show that it’s possible.” When we spoke to Sebastian, he was away on set filming for the fourth season of Almania. It was unusual, he admitted, to be talking to us about a project so early in its development. Not only did he feel that the timing was right due to the restaurant closing, he believes that the show could help make Kanaan’s vision a reality. “These guys have dreams they haven’t lived yet. We can bring their dreams to life.” Despite its early-days status, the team at Traumfabrik Babelsberg is revising the script and going over the season arcs, and if financing goes to plan, they will begin shooting next year.
Sebastian met Oz and Jalil through a friend, and when he heard their story, he couldn’t believe no one was writing about them already. “It’s crazy that these guys work together,” he said. When they told him who was working there and the problems they faced, in a fact-is-stranger-than-fiction way, the episodes almost wrote themselves. There’s the German neighbour who repeatedly called the Gesundheitsamt, the slow-burn friendship between a transgender waitress and Syrian refugee chef, then the break-in, when human faeces were left on the bar. Sebastian is working closely with Oz and Jalil so that they recognise themselves on screen. “It’s like a little treasure to have the time with them and listen, just listen, to what they have experienced in their lives.”
It’s about people from different backgrounds coming together to show that it’s possible.
As soon as Traumfabrik Babelsberg started working on the yet-unnamed dramedy, they realised how big it could be. They switched the language from German to English, not only to more effectively capture Kanaan’s mix of languages (the languages the staff there spoke were Arabic, German and Hebrew, to name a few), but to better reach an international audience. After all, Kanaan’s philosophy is bigger than Germany. “When we look at the world,” Sebastian said, “we need normal people who fight for peace, for equality, who believe that everyone is human and try to do something together – even if you’re the counter of someone.” That’s the crux of the story: two men who couldn’t be more different, coming together to create a community through food.
Just like Kanaan’s restaurant, the TV show is also about Berlin, a city Sebastian classifies as a melting pot. “Berlin is a very international city, and it’s normally a really open-minded city,” he said. “Most people who live here know that it’s not as easy as everyone says. There’s Christians, there’s Muslims, there’s Israelis, there’s a lot of things.” In a show that would explore the grey tones in an increasingly black-and-white world, the overall message would be a positive one. After all, Sebastian’s admiration for Oz and Jalil shines through in the enthusiasm of his voice, his eagerness to tell their story. “They never wanted to be political,” he told us, “but politics was put on them, even when they tried to run from it. Yet it was an engine for them, because they went viral. This is a funny thing. You try to run away from something, but you can’t – and it elevates you.”
A PLATE OF HUMMUS
At some point, it becomes hard to keep up with the ambition of Kanaan’s future: the touring, the school projects, the TV show; there’s talk of cooking classes, an online grocery store and continuing their catering service in Berlin. “We don’t know what’s going to happen in Europe. It’s not like Germany is in a good place,” Jalil made clear, but it’s the contrast of hope for and uncertainty of the future that makes their vision so compelling. Even in the midst of bombing, Jalil’s message is one of gratitude. “It’s not easy, but it’s beautiful what we made in the last 10 years,” he said. “It’s something that not a lot of people can do. We didn’t make money, but we brought something to believe in – something Berlin had to have.”
We didn’t make money, but we brought something to believe in – something Berlin had to have.
This contradicting essence of Kanaan feels reminiscent of family – not in some fuzzy, sentimental way, but in its bloody-minded tolerance, its prioritisation of love over ideology – of not agreeing, of not going in deep during every conversation, of not connecting on every level. “And we used to have it among friends,” said Oz. “With Jalil, there’s so much to fight about. I swear, if we focused the same energy on our differences as we do on the things we share, we wouldn’t have 10 years of friendship, and God knows that reality challenges us.”
For Sebastian, a common (though not singular) source of division is clear. “All this indoctrinated stuff is coming from somewhere, manipulating us and tearing us apart. Look how much hate is on Instagram, how much hate is going on anonymously.” But to eat face-to-face at a real table over real food, even if – and especially when – it feels uncomfortable offers an alternative. “You share food, you share thoughts, you share conversation. That’s where it starts.” Perhaps that’s why the closing of Kanaan doesn’t feel like an ending. The food, the thoughts and the conversation continue. Their simple vision, encapsulated by Jalil only minutes after bombs disrupted our interview for the umpteenth time, too: “All my life, I did a lot of things to bring people together over a plate of hummus.”
Keep up to date with Kanaan’s next steps at @kanaan_berlin.
