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To an increasing degree, the Jerusalem dining scene is encouraging patrons to think globally and eat locally. The hottest restaurant kitchens in the city are taking advantage of locally grown food, changing their menus with the seasons and using only the freshest of ingredients on their plates.

Many credit Eucalyptus chef Moshe Basson, winner of the Slow Food award and an internationally regarded chef, with bringing this global trend to the forefront of Jerusalem diners' minds. In addition to its focus on local ingredients, Eucalyptus is famous for its traditional Jerusalem recipes, as Basson himself regularly scours both the local hills and the local cultures for authentic Jerusalem cooking concepts from across the ages.

Today, the movement has spread to many more of Jerusalem's fine dining establishments. Apart from scouring the hills in and around Jerusalem for the perfect sprig of rosemary, Machane Yehuda is the best place in the city to find local ingredients. And indeed, hipsterati hangout Machaneyuda is taking advantage of its location - for both its name and its ingredients. The menu here changes more or less daily, although enpe and oxtail seem to make frequent appearances, and araq seems to be the top choice at the crowded bar.

Another restaurant of note currently riding the local wave is Adom, where the French and Mediterranean dinner menu varies daily and local ingredients are employed to create concoctions based on French and eastern Mediterranean styles. At chef Ezra Kedem's Arcadia, one of the city's most highly regarded eateries, ingredients are purchased daily from the Machane Yehuda market up the block, or even picked from the courtyard garden of the restaurant itself.

Yankaleh Turgeman, the head chef at 1868, explains his take on the local food movement to GoJerusalem.com. "Right now, there are a lot of herbs - rosemary, myrrh - in season around Jerusalem, in Ramat Rachel," he explains. "We have a lot of local ingredients on our menu - cow brain, ox tail, a lot of lamb, chickpeas. We are also very careful to use seasonal ingredients and change our menu a few times a year. We're located in Mamilla, so we get a lot of tourists, and we try to give them a taste of an authentic Jerusalem kitchen."

Indeed, the idea of creating an authentic Jerusalem restaurant lies at the heart of many restaurants' favoring of locally grown foodstuffs. Itamar Taragan, the chef at Canela, tells GoJerusalem.com, "We want to be thought of as one of Jerusalem's top three restaurants, so we want to make sure that we are truly a Jerusalem restaurant."

For Canela, the concept of "locally grown" extends even to the kitchen help. As Taragan explains to GoJerusalem.com, "We used to bring in staff from Tel Aviv, but today our staff is only Jerusalemites. There used to be a status associated with coming from Tel Aviv. People would be impressed to hear that a chef or a baker was from Tel Aviv, from the big city, but in the past few years, a lot of native Jerusalemite chefs who have trained throughout the world have come back to Jerusalem to work. So our local ingredients begin with our staff."

Taragan believes that to an extent, the novelty value of exotic ingredients has work off, in favor of authenticity and quality. "We don't want to use a mushroom that only grows in Japan and has to be shipped here," he says as an example. "People don't recognize its taste, so they can't judge if the dish is good or bad. It's a foreign taste to them. We use local ingredients. The meat comes from the Golan, it's local-Israeli, but our vegetables are locally grown."