Food coverage is supported by a generous donation from Susan and Moses Libitzky.
Dawn Daabul was bringing her youngest son Yonatan, 10, to winter camp at the Osher Marin JCC when they noticed a sign on the way inside: The JCC was looking for a new vendor to run its cafe.
“Ima, you should do that,” said Yonatan — never mind that his mom had little food industry experience and a busy practice as a therapist.
Daabul longed for more connection and community. Her family had always been part of the JCC, and she had worked in JCCs when she was younger. She dashed off a message to start a conversation about running the cafe.
Just six months later, in May 2025, Eli’s Deli opened with a menu featuring Israeli favorites and Jewish deli classics and a focus on working with Jewish and Israeli vendors. Daabul said the new venture felt like the right thing at the right time (though she said her son likes to take the credit).
“I’m a very intuitive person, and if something feels right, I don’t really question it too much,” she said.
At the time, Daabul’s work was taking a toll, between the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and Covid, which moved most of her practice online.
“I’m a very people-oriented person,” she said. “And for years now, I was working in my bedroom, by myself.”
Daabul was also motivated in part by her feelings of isolation following Oct. 7. As an Israeli American therapist, she said, suddenly her practice didn’t feel like a safe space anymore. So she set out to create such a space in the cafe, a space that would be distinctly Israeli.
Eli’s is named in memory of Daabul’s father-in-law, who used to run a grocery store in Kiryat Tivon, Israel, that his own father started. Before Eli’s, predecessors have been the Mangia/Nosh Cafe from 2006 to 2012 and the Plaza J Cafe from 2014 to 2020, but nothing permanent had been there since the pandemic, and Daabul doesn’t recall either cafe having a specifically Jewish menu.
Daabul was born in Israel and came to the South Bay with her parents as a child. Her husband, Avner, also Israeli, has Sephardic roots; his parents are from Syria and Lebanon. He works in the solar industry, but he also contributes time to the cafe. Both of them helped a friend sell his hummus locally at farmers’ markets, she said, but other than that neither had much experience in food going in. But she finds it a refreshing change.
The regular social interaction and the work of creating a welcoming “third space” has lifted her spirits. Plus, unlike her therapy clients’ issues, which often took up residence in her head after work hours, “if the biggest stress is that we’re running out of pastrami or something like that, it doesn’t stress me out too much,” she said.
So what’s on the menu at Eli’s? There’s an Israeli breakfast that comes with a house-made boureka (we tried the spinach-feta, which is the most popular), a hard-boiled egg, olives, tahina and chopped salad of tomatoes and cucumbers with some of the tiniest cubes we’ve seen in this type of salad. There are also items from a more American-style breakfast: a bagel from Boichik Bagels, spinach and cheese quiche and a yogurt parfait.
Sandwiches include a Reuben on marbled rye; the Green Goat, which is goat cheese with nut-free pesto, sun-dried tomatoes and arugula on a challah roll; and chicken schnitzel with fried eggplant slices and tangy slaw, plus sides of tahina, matbucha (Israeli-Moroccan cooked tomatoes), and Israeli pickles and olives.
Salads include fattoush (a Middle Eastern salad of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, fresh herbs and toasted pita chips) and a Chinese chicken salad, and the one soup is matzah ball.
The cafe also carries a wide variety of pastries, some made in-house (though, like the boureka dough, the Daabuls buy that pre-made and then create their own fillings) and some they buy from local vendors. They try to support local, Jewish or Israeli-American vendors when they can, such as Lady Babka, a Texas-based business owned by two Israeli sisters (never before had we tried mini butter pecan babka).
They have packaged foods, such as kosher salami and crackers, and Israeli snacks like Bamba and Bissli. They also sell wraps from Clara’s Kitchen, a Jewish-owned business I wrote about in 2021. And of course, they have the requisite espresso drinks (the coffee is from Equator) and smoothies.
Daabul considers the menu a work in progress. She plans to add new items from time to time, and is open to hearing what the community wants.
Since opening, Eli’s has been providing hot lunches for some of the JCC’s preschool kids, as well as the students at neighboring Brandeis Marin, using the JCC’s commercial kitchen. This helps guarantee income for the cafe, since foot traffic is limited to those using the JCC.
The menu at Eli’s is much smaller than the other two Jewish delis in Marin (Loveski in Larkspur and Bubbala’s Neighborhood Eatery in San Anselmo), and the three are so spread out there’s really no competition among them. Dabuul noted that Eli’s is the only place to get coffee on that stretch of San Pedro Road in San Rafael.
Plus, she said, “we were trying to skew a little more Israeli and Sephardic, so I think that sets us apart.”