Local living at Hotel Vera in Tel Aviv

We are sitting up on a festoon-light-draped rooftop drinking Israeli rosé, planes zooming overhead, stomachs full with one of the single best meals of my life (plus ice cream from the parlour on the corner for dessert), the street below filled with chatter and noise, feeling pretty damn smug.

This is night life in Tel Aviv.

In this amazing city the weather is warm, the food insane, the bars random but brilliant, the beach beautiful and, well, the food insane. For our four days in-situ we talked of nothing else.

But this is supposed to be a piece about Hotel Vera. I’ll wax lyrical about the city it sits in on another occasion.

This little hotel is boutique in the true sense of the word, before every chain jumped on the bandwagon and bastardised it for kicks. The friend who recommended it actually called it a B&B, although if B&Bs were like this, I’d stay in them far more often. There are only 39 rooms, which they accessorise with properly personal service: the team on the front desk booked, cancelled and re-booked about five different restaurants as I umm-ed and ahh-ed over where I wanted to eat for my birthday dinner without so much as a raised eyebrow. We came back each evening to wine coolers filled with beer in our room and hand-written notes on our pillow - I don’t know a boyfriend who does that, let alone a B&B. The result is you feel like you’re on the fast-track to local living.

And it is hipster living at its best: just squeezed green juices are pressed into our hands on arrival, the vegan options at breakfast are extensive and, best of all, a help-yourself fridge full of Israeli wines so we can truly take advantage of that roof-top, which we do pre-dinner, post-dinner, and before breakfast (although without the wine for the latter, even if it was a birthday trip).

Bang in the centre of where it’s all happening, with a tattoo joint next door, the hottest restauranteur’s latest offering emerging onto the pavement opposite each night, and gorgeous shops a few minutes away, the location is pretty damn perfect. Although, note to self, bring ear-plugs next time; ‘bang in the centre of where it’s all happening’ also means traffic starting up at 5am and building work screeching away what seemed like 24/7.

While we were there:

Herzl16 is a two-minute walk from Hotel Vera, with live music, an exceptionally cool bar and great bar snacks. We liked it so much we went back for brunch later in the trip.

Every meal we had in Tel Aviv was off-the-scale amazing, with Night Kitchen providing one of the top five dishes (we argued about this list incessantly). Go, sit at the bar, drink cocktails and definitely, definitely order the fish shawarma (and the burnt eggplant masabacha).

That ‘single best meal of my life’ I mentioned above? That was at Beit Romano. There are no signs, and if you walk the five minutes from Hotel Vera to try and find it during the day you’ll presume you’ve taken a wrong turn and ended up in a disused old shopping mall. Come back at night and it’s a totally different story, although there still aren’t any signs. The cauliflower in a bag was so good I almost cried, and that is not an exaggeration.

At some stage you’ll need to stop eating and start walking. Hotel Vera is on the edge of the Neve Tsedek area, which is full of pretty streets and gorgeous shops. As I type this, my fingers are covered in gold rings from the multiple different jewellery boutiques that stud this neighbourhood.