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Tasting the Middle East in Amman.
This weekend I met a friend in the Jordanian capital, Amman, and we spent two days eating our way through the otherwise bland Arab city.
Iraqi refugees — an estimated 700,000 live in the kingdom — have brought their cuisine with them. In the neighborhood of Rabia, Iraqi restaurants dish up such delicacies as tashreeb — lamb shank stewed in a tomato broth layered with strips of pita. Traditionalists ask for loomi Basra, a citrus fruit with a hard, black skin that comes from the southern Iraqi city of Basra. I crushed the fruit over the lamb with my spoon.
We tried qeema, a lentil stew with pulled lamb, which is said to have been banned by Saddam because it was closely associated with Shiites. We also enjoyed Mosuliyah, a version of Middle Eastern kibbeh — bulgur-encrusted ground lamb.
Amman also serves up some of the finest Lebanese cuisine in the region, including Lebanon. For breakfast: manaqeesh, a light Middle Eastern pancake stuffed with cheese, thyme or vegetables; and fetteh, a morning vehicle for yogurt, bread and chick peas.
The highlight was Fakr El-Din, an up-market Lebanese establishment with a 120-item menu, well known to Levantine foodies. The centerpiece of our table was raw ground lamb — kibbeh nayeh — some of the best we’ve ever tasted.
Our wait staff was a hopeful pan-Arab emblem of coexistence: an Egyptian Christian, and Egyptian Muslim, a Syrian Druze and a Jordanian Muslim.
And they got along with each other, they told us.
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