al Badawi

At al Badawi, Bread Is Life | The New Yorker

"At al Badawi, every meal begins with a basket of warm pita, accompanied by slender, dense green olives, olive oil, and tangy, fragrant za’atar. The dishes I most thrilled to, however, didn’t need pita—bread was efficiently incorporated into their elegantly self-contained blueprints. Much of the food of Palestine, and at al Badawi, overlaps with that of other Middle Eastern cuisines; the restaurant is co-owned by Abdul Elenani—who also owns a smaller Palestinian restaurant in Bay Ridge called Ayat (his wife, Ayat Masoud, develops recipes for both)—and Akram Nassir, the proprietor of the wonderful, long-standing Yemen Café, across the street. But 'if there is one dish that is exclusively Palestinian,' Kassis writes, 'it’s msakhan'—and if there’s one dish to order at al Badawi it’s this one." - Hannah Goldfield