Restaurant Review: A Bistro With Shish Barak (2024)

The region we now call the Levant — from the French for “rising,” like the sun, a nod to its placement on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean — stretches across Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon, through Syria and Jordan. It is a place of civilization’s beginning, part of the so-called Fertile Crescent, home to some of mankind’s earliest agricultural experiments and of current and intractable conflict. It’s heartening, at a disheartening moment, to visit Huda, a “new Levantine bistro” in Williamsburg. Its owner, Gehad Hadidi — who in 2019 bought midtown’s La Bonne Soupe, a more traditional bistro with Burgundy snails, niçoise salad, and moules frites — is of Palestinian and Syrian ancestry with a Jordanian passport; its chef, Omneyah Hassan, who previously cooked at Celestine and Pasquale Jones, is of Egyptian descent.

All over the city, there seems to be a new energy in Middle Eastern cuisine: the Palestinian kitchens of Ayat and al Badawi, the Israeli Shmoné, and the Lebanese Sawa. Huda opened in the fall on a quiet corner by the BQE, just slightly off the beaten track. It has made itself at home in the neighborhood: Every time I went, the room was full and humming. The décor borrows from the start-up bistro playbook, with small wooden tables, velvet-upholstered benches, plastered walls, and dimly glowing lights, but the menu feels appreciably its own from the start. Every meal begins with a dish, unbidden, of fresh chickpeas, spring green in their edamamelike pods. To these, you might add a co*cktail of mint and arak (the anise-flavored Levantine spirit similar to Greek ouzo or French pastis) or a tiny tumbler of harissa-and-olive-laced vodka — a meze served as a shot. (You can sip. We sipped.)

Hassan takes the bistro part of the assignment seriously, too, and several of the dishes could do double duty on La Bonne Soupe’s menu were it not for the welcome addition of some spice. What would be labeled “beef tartare” in Manhattan is here turned into kibbe naya, chopped raw beef tenderloin given a little textural interest by the addition of bulgur, as they do in Lebanon. Where the French swear by their simple salade de carottes râpées, Hassan dresses her tangle of grated carrots with golden raisins and a sweet-sour honey-sumac dressing and adds pita and pomegranate molasses.

Strict adherence to tradition is not the point. “We have a lot of Palestinians coming in here giving us side-eye,” confessed our server, because the msakhan, a Palestinian dish usually composed of roasted chicken over taboon flatbread, is here a boned, flattened branzino. The fish turns out to be a bit mild to carry the whole, even when dusted generously with sumac. But no one had that problem with the shish barak, plump, ground-beef-stuffed dumplings — “Lebanese tortellini,” as the menu describes them, though they are equally cousin to pierogi and the full global spectrum of dumplings — napping in a thick, creamy yogurt sauce gleaming around the edges with chile-tinted oil.

As Arabic pop plays, you may wonder why everyone doesn’t throw calorie counting to the wind to serve every bowl of tortellini this way or put little grilled squid over a squidgy pile of tahini-rich hummus enlivened by a rough mince of olives and vinegar. Here and throughout, Hassan walks a fine line, balancing the pillowy and the bracing, the sweet and the sour, comfort and tension, with an acrobatic grace.

Hadidi has said his family’s recipes were the starting point, but Hassan has bistro’d them into something with their own sense of place. “Cheap dates,” a $6 amuse-bouche of medjools warmed in ghee and spicy with cinnamon and paprika, are almost too simple for restaurant food, except that my table fought over them to the last pit. Or a little dish of ice cream, fragrant with mastic and rose water, with a melting spoonful of pistachio butter on top. They’re small gestures, good ones, maybe even hopeful. The bill arrives on a pile of stickers: Free Palestine.

Tags:

• remove interruptions
• top story
• restaurant review
• new york magazine

Show Leave a Comment