Moshe Levi, owner and proprietor of Slow Moshe,
a Nachalot landmark, went into the bar business because he thought it
would get him girls. After serving as an Egged tour bus driver in a
previous incarnation, a slipped disk moved Moshe out of the driver’s
seat and onto the bar stool. Moshe opened his bar close to his home in
Jerusalem’s Nachalot
neighborhood (the easier to stumble back after a night of drinking…)
in late 1999. Three years ago, Moshe opened a second branch in Tel
Aviv.
Our first question is one you probably get all the time. What makes you deserving of the name Slow Moshe? At first I wanted to call the bar barboor (swan), because I had just got back from the United States and I
thought the swan was a beautiful animal. There were a bunch living
under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and I liked that
association. I also liked the sound of it and the fact that it worked
on two levels – as the word swan in Hebrew and as bar-boor, bar and
boor, in English. I even started applying to the municipality for a
permit for that name, but a friend said to me “In English, there’s an
expression ‘slow motion’ and you’re slow and you’re Moshe, so that
would be a great gimmick.” So I decided to go with Slow Moshe instead.
There
have been a lot of changes in Nachlaot in past few years. How have the
development and the gentrification of Nachlaot affected your business? They’ve
been good. I started the gentrification on this street (Nissim Bachar),
I woke up this street. Jerusalem needs parties, it needs things to do,
it doesn’t just need bars. Each year, because of Slow Moshe and our
street parties (which we sometimes hold even without a permit), the street developed and now Nissim Bachar is like a midrachov (pedestrian walkway), it’s like Sheinken Street in
Tel Aviv, but it’s Jerusalem style, which means it quiets down on
Shabbat. I want this vibe to grow, I want there to be even more midrachov style here.
Your
bar is much more of a local pub/community center than other bars in
central Jerusalem. In addition to holiday parties and themed nights
with reggae DJ sets and the like, you have clothing swaps, art
exhibitions, and the bar even puts up a sukka for that holiday. There was even a minyan prayer group that met there sporadically a couple of years ago. How did the bar end up in this role? I don’t know. I love nightlife and I love when people enjoy themselves,
and I also want to make money, so I’m keep thinking up new ideas. A lot
of my clients are students from Bezalel, so we started doing art
exhibits here in the bar. I really love art, although I myself am not
an artist. I give my walls to the artists and I let those who display
their work drink for free while their work is up. They don’t have a lot
of money – they’re struggling artists, and I want to be fair. They help
me, they lend me their art, so I help them, I give them free beer.
So many Jerusalem bars are cold, anonymous and cookie-cutter. What other bars in the city get it right in your opinion, and why? I
really like pubs that attract a population that comes to enjoy
themselves and not to lose themselves in drink. I like to go to pubs
that attract a population similar to the one at Slow Moshe. I like Sira, Hataklit and Stardust. And every Sunday in the summer I go to tapas in the shuk [at Café Mizrachi], because each Sunday the music is different and I feel like I’m in Greece when I go there.
What about Slow Moshe makes it specifically Jerusalemite in flavor? How does that translate over at the Tel Aviv branch? I brought some of Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and some of Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. Haoman 17 and Ima opened branches in Tel Aviv at that same time that I opened the Tel Aviv Slow Moshe, and a lot of Jerusalemites had recently moved
there too. I opened my bar in Florentine because that was the area that
was attracting the former Jerusalemites. My ultimate goal is to open a
Slow Moshe in Manhattan, and I see Tel Aviv as the first step in that.
If the bar is economically successful in Tel Aviv, and so far it hasn’t
been, then I would like to open one in Manhattan. Manhattan is where I
married my wife and had my son, so the place holds a lot of memories
for me.
Getting back to spreading the Jerusalem flavor, my clients in Tel Aviv are people from the mercaz (central Israel) who moved to Jerusalem to study. When they graduated, they left Jerusalem and moved back to the mercaz, to Florentine, which is very similar to Nachlaot in vibe. It has a lot
of students and student type characters. So we attract a lot of
ex-Jerusalemites there, people who knew Slow Moshe in Jerusalem and
were happy to see a branch open in Tel Aviv. We also get a lot of
native Tel Avivians. Slow Moshe is a neighborhood bar in Jerusalem and
it’s a neighborhood bar in Tel Aviv too. It’s very similar to the
Jerusalem branch in that way.
Photo by Adina Polen.
