As close as it gets to the Far East, without the flight itself

It’s unclear where Hani Shem Tov gets all that energy, or how many hours are actually in her day, but it’s fascinating to see someone who holds two full-time jobs plus still finds time to chat—and even more impressively, finds time to smile.

It's doubtful this is how you'd imagine the off-duty hours of a busy traffic lawyer. Given what’s happening on our roads, I would have expected to find her in a permanent anger management workshop or in one of those amazing rooms where you’re invited to smash TV screens with a baseball bat.

Instead, she’s doing the exact opposite. Building instead of breaking, bridging instead of bulldozing. And guess what? One of the coolest stores in Israel came out of it.

Balagan is at the very least a Netanya institution, but after nearly 40(!) years in operation, it's certainly a place not enough people know about. In fact, like all truly great institutions, it's almost hidden away, waiting to be discovered.

The shop on Pinsker Street was opened and run by Hanan, Shem Tov’s brother, at a time when delis and grocery stores selling Far Eastern products were as rare as flights to the Far East themselves, and certainly didn’t occupy every street corner in every city in the country. He was smart and efficient, recognized the growing market of foreign workers, and understood it was an entire economy—with sub-economies too.

When he passed away about three years ago, she had to figure out what to do with the business, and very quickly realized the answer was far from her original plan. “I fell in love,” she recalled, “I just fell in love with the store.”

The entrance catches you off guard and totally surprises you. Forget about the fancy designs of the new East-Asian shops. Welcome to the real deal. For years, she says, even the display window was blocked by opaque stickers, until she finally managed to open it and give passersby a wink.

“I wanted to renovate, but the regular customers asked me to leave it just like this,” she said. “Just like this,” meaning as authentic as it gets—no artificial, usually fake elements that make you walk around stiff and on the defensive. No, here there are fewer decorations and more truth, less sparkle and more sparks.

And yes, that affects the prices too—from the opposite and highly unusual direction, by Israeli standards. Here, everything you see on the shelf would cost more, sometimes much more, in other similar stores.

The shelves are bursting with possibilities, strongly reminiscent of real stores in the East—from Thailand to India, Vietnam to Korea, including forays into South America and wherever else the food is good. It’s not exactly balagan (mess), as the name suggests, but it’s definitely maximum content in minimum space—an arrangement that makes you stop for several seconds and still not manage to visually absorb all the goods.

There’s cosmetics and alcohol, huge sacks of rice and rare sauces, bamboo shoots and cassava, coffee and chocolate-based energy drinks, Ube pancakes and spaghetti, frozen mango sticky rice meals and rice cakes, desserts from the Philippines (“like marble cake—it’s their childhood flavor. When they heard I brought it, they went wild and cleaned out the cartons”), and noodles from the islands, lace sheets destined to become nems and chapati flour, vegetables suited for Asian cuisine—bitter lemon and Thai eggplant, Indian beans and okra—and also home goods, pots and steam trays, fortune cookies and all the snacks you saw on TikTok, at 7-Eleven, on a trip or vacation. All of them—even the ones you never thought you’d reunite with.

And still, the added value of Balagan, and of Shem Tov herself, is not the trade and not even the livelihood—it’s the community, and what has formed around the store, thanks to it, and because of her.

“During COVID, young Israelis who love to cook started coming here too,” she said. “Today, they come and connect with the foreign workers' communities, and on Fridays, you can see entire conversations over beer, tips and recipe exchanges, even prepared food sales and short language lessons. We teach them Hebrew, and they teach us Thai.”

She’s convinced that the workers love the country, but she also knows how hard and challenging life here is—even without being far from home and family, and certainly in a time like this. Sometimes, on Saturdays, she drives south or north just to make a special delivery for someone who’s moved too far from the store because of their job. She sits and talks with them, enjoys the connection, and comes home with her own gift—fresh vegetables straight from the field, for example, and mostly a deep internal feeling of doing what’s good and right. What’s Israeli.

It’s still unclear where the energy comes from, and we still don’t know how her day ended up with more hours. What is clear, though, is that the energy and the time were channeled to the right person—and to the right store.