An old auto-repair shop has been transformed into dining destination Mansura in Tel Aviv-Jaffa’s Noga neighbourhood.

Israeli practice This Is It designed the restaurant’s rugged interiors, which spotlight the former garage’s high ceilings and concrete pillars. Concrete floors and a corrugated metal partitions have also been kept, mixed with new elements that jibe with Mansura’s semi-industrial surrounds.

‘We wanted the restaurant to feel like a natural evolution of the location, not too foreign or [too much] of a contrast,’ says practice co-founder Noa Kedar. ‘We decided to keep and preserve some elements.’

A curving bar, topped with green Udaipur marble, provides a visual link between the kitchen and the dining room, and was the first intervention in the open space. Tables and seating fan out around the bar, and are a mash-up of styles – a nod to the building’s layered history, which includes stints as a flower shop and metal works.

Restored school chairs, and old ‘Kibbutz’ Formica tables sit between contemporary black lacquered tables and Modernist chairs to create a rowdy dialogue between old and new.

This contrast can also be read on Mansura’s walls, which featured exposed brick and peeling plaster, juxtaposed with bright blue terrazzo tiles and planes, and are hung with tube lighting by Naama Hofman. This Is It has also installed a blue metal grid from the entrance to the kitchen window, providing a framework for plants.

Mansura’s menu focuses on local ingredients, with an emphasis on fresh fish, including fillet of barracuda served on a bed of green vegetables, and smaller plates such as calamari on polenta.

Mansura, 13 דרך שלמה, Tel Aviv

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