Baharat

The 15 Best Portland, Maine Restaurants | Condé Nast Traveler

"Baharat is an ambitious but unpretentious brick-and-mortar boîte, where the attitude is cool (note the garage door walls that stay open to the street in warm weather) and the street food-meets-elegant dishes are hot. As you could fairly expect with a name like Baharat (it translates to "spices” in Arabic), the kitchen here knows its way around a spice rack. Chef Norris employs the Middle East’s superstars—a cardamom-laced zhoug sauce and smoked paprika on the za’atar deviled eggs, for example—to deftly elevate nearly every dish. Spicy and sweet abound here, as with the seared salmon with black lentil salad, Moroccan olives, fennel, and sumac vinaigrette, and the house favorite: lamb kofta with tangy tzatziki and pomegranate molasses. And don’t bypass the All In, a large-format production—so big it arrives on a sheet pan—of tangy-sweet house-made pickles and an Iraqi flatbread that’s equal parts fluffy and chewy." - Alexandra Hall