A restaurant in Afula tailored to ketogenic diets would be unusual all by itself. After all, “Keto” is far more popular in hip Tel Aviv neighborhoods. But put that restaurant in a loft suspended above a huge liquor store in small-town , and unusual is too mild a word.
To vastly oversimplify the concept, a keto diet requires the elimination or near-elimination of carbohydrates from the food you eat. Your brain needs glucose: simple sugar. Carbs are stored sugars.
Once you take them out of your diet, your liver will break down glycogen (an excess of which is stored as fat), feeding your brain and body with the sugar it needs to survive. Ketogenic diets are more popular than ever these days, but they’ve been around for a long time under different names. The Atkins diet is a form of keto, as was “the hot dog diet” of the 1960s, as meat contains no carbs.
The Keto Brown Cafe, though, is strictly vegetarian, with plenty of as well. Yossi Rafael has owned the Red & Brown liquor store downstairs for several years, but the cafe, which offers a beautiful view of countless bottles of booze, has only been open for less than a year. And the sitting area has only been open for about two months.
Needless to say, this is a difficult time for everyone in Israel. Yossi has an interesting problem: customers are easy to find, but workers are as rare as, for example, a keto restaurant in a liquor store. If you’re a meat-eater (full disclosure: I am), it’s easy to think that a keto m.