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Brooklyn, New York

A celebration of street-food
Jul 20th 2007 From Economist.com

Our diarist swoons at the scent of barbecued meat

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Friday

NO RESTAURANT for me today. Im going to a soccer match in Red Hook, an out-of-the-way neighbourhood right next to my own. Red Hook is bordered to the north by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and on its other three sides by waterthe Buttermilk Channel, Gowanus bay and the Gowanus canal. On the Waterfront was set here, though filmed elsewhere. In those days the docks were bustling. Later Red Hook shared the New York shipping industry's decline. Today it may be the quietest part of Brooklyn: no industry, no traffic (you cant get anywhere from here), a subway just skirting the northern fringes. The architecture juxtaposes the personal and impersonal like nowhere else in the city. There are two-up-two-downs in the shadows of block-long warehouses, cobblestone streets with highway views, fishermen casting lines off piers as container ships rumble by, andmy destinationa humble soccer and baseball pitch surrounded by housing projects. Semi-professional soccer teams began playing on this pitch in the late 1960s. Im not sure which enterprising soul first sold home-made food to spectators here, but the city should build a statue to her (and Id bet dollars to doughnuts it was a her, the wife or girlfriend or

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mother of one of the players). The competitors and spectators are Latino, like many of Red Hooks residents; the food vendors sell the sort of homey backyard barbecue fare that restaurants either avoid or do badly. They hail from Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Mexico. Every weekend afternoon from May to October they drag out their grills, coolers, weather-beaten tarps, tubs of vegetables and barrels of drinks, to create a democratic and delicious anti-restaurant, as the vendors leader calls it: a culinary treasure more about community than commerce, open to everyone. Gentrification has started to lap at the fringes of Red Hook. A Fairway supermarket opened last year. An IKEA is taking over a 19th-century dry dock. That makes these vendors all the more precious. Im making my first trip of the year, though its already summer. Neither my wife, nor my sister who lives a couple of neighbourhoods away, has been here before, and its all I can do to keep from grabbing their arms and sprinting across a dozen lanes of speeding traffic to reach the fields. This year the food stalls have been gaining wider acclaim. The New York Times has reviewed them favourably; four-star chefs have been visiting; the increasingly popular and powerful New York culinary blogosphereincluding Josh Karant, an academic who runs a redoubtable blog, The Porkchop Expresshave sung their praises far and wide. In past years, Latino families have outnumbered other patrons; this year, according to Mr Karant, the clientele is about 60% gringo. Tackling a place like this requires a considered strategy, or abandon coupled with bouts of Roman purging. We opt for the former. First, drinks. Two stands selling fruit and aguas frescas flank the entrance to the fields, their barrels every colour of the fluorescent rainbow. We order three drinks: limon, a pale-green limeade made with a wonderfully light hand on the sugar dispenser; tamarindo, earthy tasting and weak-tea brown; and jamaica, a livid purple sorrel drink (so named because sorrel either came or was thought to have come from Jamaica) sweet enough to give me tooth-shivers. Food, with only three of us to eat it, is harder. Whatever we choose, we will leave so much deliciousness unsampled. After a couple of indecisive circuits, the smell of grilling meats is making me swoon (why does nobody make a ladies perfume that smells like barbecue?). Finally, we decide: tacos, pupusas and a huarache. That means no milky white, lime-rich ceviche mixto, no crusty golden empanadas, no soft earthy tamales and no Dominican bistec con plantanos (what it actually means is a return trip next week). Fifteen minutes later, food in hand, we claim half a picnic table, the other half having been claimed already by a toddler who sambas barefoot across the tabletop, tiny muddy footprints drawing closer, until I point a plastic fork toward him and his mother snatches him away. My three tacos are a Pueblan triumph, simple yet elegant: soft corn tortillas enclosing a healthy handful of cecina (salted, dried and grilled beef), some chopped tomato and onion, some pico de gallo and a spray of lettuce and coriander leaves. I top two with tomatillo sauce and one with a red sauce so fiery I have to scrape it off. My sister is a petite woman, but still, when I first saw her return with a huarache the size of her head, I was concerned. But then I rejoiced: no way could she finish that. A huarache is essentially a huge tacogrilled steak, vegetables, a sprinkling of queso fundido, salsawhose tortilla is tossed onto the grill so it blisters, crisps and puffs. It must be attacked in stages. First you nibble the filling, then you tear off the edges of tortilla, and only then, after its thinner and sleeker, can you pick it up and eat it. Which, after my sister
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throws down her fork in defeat, I do. Pupusas, a Salvadoran snack, are masa (cornmeal) cakes stuffed with a combination of cheese, beans and braised shredded meat, fried until crisp on a griddle. They are richer than tacos. Our arrive with pickled cabbage on the side to cut through the grease. They taste simpler and richer than the tacos, with fewer but more concentrated flavours. I wish I hadnt just eaten my weight (or what used to be my weight) in tacos; halfway through a second pupusa, I give up. Melancholy haunts the afternoon, enjoyable though it is. This may be the vendors last year. The city parks commissioner has announced that a temporary use agreement under which the vendors have been operating will not be renewed. He wants to open the concessions to commercial bidding. The issue has the makings of fight: not long ago Chuck Schumer, a senator from New York not known for backing losing causes, showed up at the ballfields with a television crew in his wake, to back the vendors. E-mail and letter-writing campaigns have broken out in support of them. It's hard to imagine anybody wanting Red Hook to get the same hot-dog, funnel-cake and pretzel stands that do their dreary, dirty business in every other New York park. It is a melancholy day for another reason, too. Even if the Red Hook vendors return next spring, Ill be gone. Heaven is a hot huarache After living in Brooklyn for most of my adult life, Im moving away from New York at the end of the month. Unlike most of my neighbours, I have no very deep roots here. I was born in one city, raised in another, and did not reach Brooklyn until my early 20s. But I have lived here long enough to see my neighbourhood change and to be changed by it. In a wonderful book called Colossus of New York, Colson Whitehead writes: No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, 'That used to be Munsey's', or 'That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge'...when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now. New York is certainly more protean than most European cities, but I wonder whether Mr Whitehead didnt capture something larger here, something of the wistfulness inherent in urban life. To live in a city is to live in a teeming, hectic present amidst the burnished memories and unblemished hopes of millions of other citizens. Things were great before you got here, and theyll be wonderful after you leave, but while you are here you are always just the same old you. Its a horrible fate, I know, and no less horrible for being universal, but I will always be grateful to have suffered it in Brooklyn, if only for a while. Back to top >>

Thursday

KENSINGTON is the hub of New Yorks Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, although, as with much of central Brooklyn, it contains multitudes: Hasidic American Jews and secular Russian and central Asian Jews, West Indians, Chinese, Central Americans, Poleseven a few telltale shamrocks still hang in pub windows here and there.

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Late Friday nights after prayers, the restaurants, barber-shops, music stalls and other sorts of mom-and-pop commerce throng with families, strollers and window-shoppers. Even on a regular weekday night such as this one life happens outside, on the streets. A lot of the commerce here has an improvised feeling to ittransportable stalls, shops that sell everything, but only one of everything. I fear the copyright police may have got to my two favourite stores on Coney Island Avenue: Kantacky Fried Chicken and the 6-12 corner store. Both have closed, though a Kennedy Fried Chicken thrives still in all five New York boroughs. I spent the better part of a decade living in London, which, statistically, I was always told, is at least as international as New York. But statistics only go so far. No matter how diverse the crowd, London is always the same old London. It was like this before you got here and it will be the same long after youre toes-up in a box. New Yorks inhabitants, especially in the outer boroughs, define their surroundings much more assertively, and they should. Once they get here theyre Americans. Its their city as much as it is anyone elses. Theyre neither guests, nor, whatever certain presidential candidates wish to think, are they here at anybodys sufferance. Statistically, Brooklyn, if it were broken off from Manhattan, would be the fourth most populous city in America after New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. And, despite what the subway maps seem to depict, it is enormous, less a coherent city than a mosaic of clearly defined neighbourhoods, in which the only people who feel confident traipsing from one neighbourhood to the next for something as trivial as dinner are outsiders like us, who have no stake in any of them. In a neighbourhood such as this one you can step off the subway and feel the addictive, disorienting thrill of being a foreigner in your own city. A friend and I board the subway amid the suits and bustle of midtown; we alight 45 minutes later at Church Avenue, which feels impossibly more tranquil. Church is one of those broad, pacific Brooklyn streets that can seem at sunset, with the magenta-earth rowhouses aglow and the honeyed light shimmering through the trees and paving the street with gold coins, a Platonic ideal of urban American life. We are heading for Jhinuk, a Bangladeshi restaurant whose name, my companion tells me, means oyster in Hindi and shell in Bengali, though in this case it seems used more for its connotationa somewhat ordinary-looking thing that holds a precious jewelthan as a menu harbinger. There isnt an oyster in sight. Jhinuk is less a restaurant than a cafeteria, with long bare tables leading to a steam-table at the front. Groups of customers joke in Bengali in the boisterous, relieved, unspooled manner of men at the end of a working day. From a pair of flat-screen televisions a henna-bearded hajji lectures, finger wagging and face set stern, before a superimposed backdrop of Mecca. The steam-table holds delights: butterfish and shad in a herb gravy, tandoori chicken the colour of fire trucks, bony hunks of goat, samosas, pakoras, other fried delicacies I cant identify. Neither of us speaks Bengali, and when we reach the front of the line the man behind the counter looks at us with wary amusement. We try to order, but he tells usin rolling, hyper-precise Englishto sit down; he will make up combination plates and bring them to us.

I lived for a while in Russia, and the first night I brought a market chicken home for dinner my wife looked at the scrawny yellow thing in horror

In such proximity to a steam table, the offer, though generous, makes my heart sink. I want fresh-off-the-fire kebabs; my friend wants the fish the proprietor has warned us against (Too many bones). Instead we get two meat and three veg. The standout dish is stewed goat served on the bone in a sauce rich with warm spicescloves, cinnamon, cardamom. People often wrinkle their noses at goat, but, prepared right, it can be delicious, richer and yet more tender and delicate than lamb. (Americans arent big on rabbit, either: too many nursery rhymes.) The accompanying chicken legs actually taste of chicken, a rarity for American poultry. I lived for a while in Russia, and the first night I

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brought a market chicken home for dinner my wife looked at the scrawny yellow thing in horror, but it actually tasted like meat, rather than looking like a magazine photo and tasting like nothing.
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Paan: this one's for the ladies

The vegetables, all of which taste like they spent a little too long on a steam table, are a bit too soft and similar for my taste. All are yellow with fenugreek, dotted with whole spices, and, except for some stern-fibred cauliflower, limp as overcooked noodles. Still, even if the vegetables are overdone and the chicken somewhat workaday, the price for this feastwhich includes two rounds of fresh naan and two sodasis $11. My friend and I had stopped at a midtown bar on the way to the subway; a beer and a whiskey had cost us $16.50. As we rise to leave, a Three Stooges movie (dubbed in Bengali, of course) replaces the minatory hajji. I fleetingly and selfishly wonder if it was for our benefit (my friend and I are the only two non-Bengalis in the restaurant), but then I notice other diners cackling as their attention drifts away from their companions and toward the on-screen antics. By the time we leave, night has fallen, and the street seems livelier and more bustling. Commerce spills out of stores; men chat and smoke on stoops and in front of shop windows. At a cart next to the subway entrance we buy two sweet paan for dessert, provoking shy laughter from paan-wallah and his friends. Im not sure whats funny: two men asking for sweet paan (the sweet variety is for women and children; men tend to order the version with red betel nuts or tobacco), or two Westerners ordering paan at all. Watching the ritual preparationthe snipping of the leaves, the precise and delicate ordering of the fillingprovides a final bit of street theatre. Eating the paan is a sort of theatre in the mouth. The tastes come in wavesmenthol, honey, fennel, coconut, cloveand I arrive home with my cheek still bearing the tell-tale bulge, smelling like a spice rack. Back to top >>

Wednesday
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BRIGHTON Beach began as a summer getaway for wealthy 19th-century New Yorkers, until the local railway was integrated with the city subway system; by the turn of the 1930s it was densely populated, mostly by European Jewish immigrants. Fifty years later new waves of Jewish migrs arrived from the Soviet Union, lifting the neighbourhood out of a mid-century decline. Culturally distinct from their forebears, they turned Brighton Beach into a living museum of a particular point in history. It feels more Russian now than any other place outside Russia, and more Soviet than contemporary Moscow. The subway ride from western Brooklyn, where I live, takes riders (above ground) through the leafy neighbourhoods of Ditmas Park and Midwood before hooking east into the maritime density of Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach. It is among my favourite rides in the city, not least for the pleasure of arriving. I cannot get out here often enough. My fathers family comes from Russia, and though I am as assimilated as any other third-generation American, enough of the old country seeped into my upbringing to make me swoon with nostalgia at the first whiff of kasha. If any place in New York has magic, this one does, with its long sea-line and endless evening light, and its residents who come from a country and a culture that exist no longer. On this occasion I'm dragging nine friends out for an evening at Primorskis, one of Brighton Beach Avenues supper clubs, where for a fixed price per head you get more food than you can eat and a floor show that treads a very Russian line between heartfelt and garish. Our first course is already on the table when we arrive: trays of pickled vegetables, including wonderfully summery, lightly-pickled cherry tomatoes; smoked salmon and sturgeon that has about three hours before it attracts every hungry alley-cat in southern Brooklyn; under-seasoned cold chicken; basturma, tongue and ham. That all of this is salty is no accident: it is designed to encourage drinking, and our waiter arrives in due time with a bottle ofBelgianvodka. This food is neither good nor bad. Either you like it, or you dont. Personally, I would eat a pickled shoe. Arriving next is a wave of salatimayonnaise-heavy Russian salads served in scoops. One of them, salat olivier, almost provokes Proustian tears from a Ukranian-born friend across the table. Another friend knows it from her Hungarian grandmother as French salad; the only difference is that Russians credit the chef by name, not merely nationality. The highest compliment I can pay this mixture of chicken, potatoes, carrots and pickles, all cubed and held together with mayonnaise and sour cream, is that it holds its scoop-shape unnervingly well.
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Brighton Beach Avenue

More interesting is the lobio, a Georgian salad made from kidney beans, ground walnuts, garlic, herbs and pomegranate. Georgian food is to Russia as Indian food is to Britain: a refreshing blast of spice and flavour in an otherwise flat and arid culinary landscape. Buba Primorski, for whom the restaurant is named, was a refugee from Georgia. After he retired, his sons took over. The current owners are not Primorskis, but they kept the name and the culinary bent. Immediately after the khachapuribread stuffed with salty cheesearrives, the evenings entertainment begins. A tall Asian woman in a spangly white dress takes the stage and belts out a Kheppi Birsdey to Georgi, a lantern-jawed young man in a shiny, form-fitting shirt, who rises obligingly. She gestures next towards a table in the centre of the room and announces that we have a very special guest with us tonight: a man who is celebrating his 120th birthday. I look across the table at my Ukrainian friend just to confirm that I didnt misunderstand (the hostess, of course, is speaking Russian). He has the same incredulous, sceptical look I do. I know full well that the oldest person on earth is a few years short of 120, and certainly couldnt do the springy, knock-kneed chicken dance that the elderly gentleman does as he circles his table for a victory hobble. But the hostess sticks to her story, and suddenly everybodys up and drinking, dancing and toasting. At some point, more food emerges: big lamb dumplings, chicken that spent a little too long on the grill, a green salad and, eventually, an assortment of cakes the colour and texture of kitchen sponges. But by nowor even a few hours earlierfood has become an afterthought. Primorskis closes at 3, but with nothing to celebrate and long rides home, we cant quite make it that long. I share a car home with a couple of friends. The rest of the party takes the subway. I hear the next day most of them snored all the way home. Back to top >>

Tuesday

THE ten-block walk from the subway along Eighth AvenueBrooklyns Chinatown, in Sunset Parktakes me past open-air fishmarkets selling turtles and blue crabs so fresh they escape. A Chinese toddler squeals with delight as a crab scuttles across her foot, and squeals even louder as the fishmonger, with practised grace, returns it to captivity with the help of a long metal hook. Further down are noodle-shops with matrons in the window who somehow coax a ball of dough into perfectly shaped noodles simply by stretching and reforming it, over and over; beauty salons with glossy-haired teenage girls primping for the evening as they gossip in Chinese; and a Turkish mosque with a steady stream of worshippers hugging and shaking hands by the doorway. Moving at more than a leisurely pace is impossible, unless you follow in the wake of one of the innumerable deliverymen who plough through the crowd with hand-trucks, and then you need to steel yourself and suppress your sense of guilt as you shove past old ladies, barge through hand-holding teenagers and vault over toddlers.

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Fortunately, our destination, a restaurant called Pacificana, is, as the name promises, significantly more peaceful. A hangar-sized space serving high-end Cantonese food, it is decorated in Chinese-restaurant chintz, with angular chandeliers, red carpets, silk tapestries, slatted wood. For all the bustling dim-sum business on weekend mornings, on a weekday evening like this one it feels rather funereal. Most of our fellow diners are Chinese families: a good sign. Younger couples prefer the avenues trendier spots: Hong Kong cafes lit in neon and drowning in saccharine Asia-pop, ersatz Malaysian and Vietnamese places run by Chinese with Sinofied cuisine, and even the Soccer Tavern, a squat little brick place that looks like a fallout shelter and has Budweiser signs as well as, of course, shamrocks in the window. After much consultation, our quintet orders more food than we need in order to satisfy both the adventurous and the conservative wings. Our first appetiser comes out of the kitchen quickly, and is nearly delivered to a Chinese family at the next table by mistake: it comprises a mounded tangle of cold quivering jellyfish surrounded by half-moons of cured pork. Eating a stinging invertebrate requires an initial leap of faith, but jellyfish, particularly when it is as well prepared as this, rewards the effort. It has a pleasant, briny crunch and a vinegar tang. It tastes more vegetable than animal. The surrounding pork is a sort of terrine, with a perfectly even layer of gelatine surrounding a mild, pink brine-cured disc of meat. Rounding out our appetisers are a plate of barbecued pork, which tastes like Chinese barbecued pork everywhere (which is to say: better than almost anything else in the world), and some steamed vegetable dumplings, which look and taste like they have been stuffed with chopped pencil erasers. In fact, the filling is mostly made of tiger-lily buds and preserved cabbage, and it illustrates just how different the same dish can be when prepared for Chinese rather than Western palates.

Our first appetiser comprises a mounded tangle of cold quivering jellyfish surrounded by half-moons of cured pork

The first main course to arrive is beef sauted with scallions and ginger. I pride myself on eating adventurously, so I am almost embarrassed at how much I like it. Like the steamed dumplings, it is a more authentic version of a dish familiar from a corner Chinese takeaway; unlike the dumplings, however, it actually tastes better. The sauce is light and winey rather than gloopy and canned, the scallions are fat and lightly charred from the wok, the ginger comes in appreciable threads. A crispy garlic chicken, served on the bone and hacked into bite-size pieces with a cleaver, offers a similarly robust economy of flavour: just garlic and good-quality chicken. Whereas Western chefs tend to rub a chicken with butter or oil before roasting it at moderate heat, resulting in soft flesh and somewhat flabby skin, Chinese chefs first dry the chicken and then roast it at high heat, giving it a crisp skin and tougher meat. I prefer the latter. It requires a smaller and more flavourful bird than the winged sofa pillows we find shrink-wrapped and cowering in supermarket refrigerator cases.
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Flying fish

We ordered sauted peashoots with garlic, out of guilt, mainly, theyre green and healthy. But they prove the second-most popular dish after the beef. Pea shoots, usually ignored in the western kitchen, are the leafy stalks of the green-pea plant, and have a grassy, tonic crispness similar to watercress, but with better texture. Only our final two dishes present our bifurcated group with problems. The first sounded innocuous: six steamed oysters with ginger and scallion. The oysters in question, however, are each about the size of a human hand (not including the shell), and when the waiter places them on the table a fish-tank funk rises above the aromatics. They arent off, just considerably more assertive than the specimens Im used to, and it takes a strong resolve to chew and swallow one. I wouldnt do it again. Two of the six remain uneaten, and the waiter didnt look surprised. The second dish had an innocuous sounding name: casserole of pork with preserved vegetables. When we ordered it, the waitera broad-necked older gentlemen with a suave manner, a head of wavy, brilliantined hair, and an aura of physical menaceactually laughed. You know thats fat, right? Soft fat. With the skin still attached? He stared at us fixedly. At this point, we had two options. We could have said, No, we didnt know that; perhaps we should order something else. But then we would have looked bad, frightened: then hed might ask if we didnt just want some spring rolls and chow mein, and for the right price he could walk over to that lovely Irish restaurant just down the street with the red sign and golden arches and fetch something that might be more to our taste. Instead, I said, Of course we know what it is. Consequently, when a cast-iron pot holding a mass of earthy cabbage covered in gelatinous chunks of fat and skin arrives at our table, I have no one but myself to blame. Unfortunately, thats exactly who my fellow diners also blame. I wish I could say I appreciate something about this dish, but I cant. I love bacon, pork belly and pig fat when it offers a nice textural contrastthe crunch of the rind giving way to yielding fat beneathbut when its braised to uniform flabbiness, it loses its appeal. The only thing I learn here is to give casseroles on a Chinese menu the widest of berths. Back to top >>

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Monday

I HAVE heard people express doubts about the Yemen Caf. It looks unwelcoming, they say, dark and a little dingy. Yemeni men huddle over bone-littered tables, chattering at full volume, their faces just inches apart. I can, in fact, confirm that this is among the most dangerous restaurants in Brooklyn. Not because of the voluble and friendly clientele, nor the foodthe bathrooms are clean, a sure sign of a clean kitchenbut because of a more serious danger well known to anyone who has ever travelled in Muslim or Arab countries: extreme, almost antic, hospitality. The first time I ate here was with five other diners. It was a Friday, the restaurant was packed, and we were the only non-Yemeni table. We ordered enough food for a small army, but they kept bringing more, unordered and uncharged. We said we liked the roast lamb, and the ownera jolly, balding, moustachioed man who looks like he has caused the demise of many a flock himselfbrought out another plate and watched us eat it. We heaped praise on the oven-fresh, crackling pita: out came a small tower. After the meal, he followed us out into the street to shake hands and pointed us toward the subway, two blocks away (as it happens, two of us, including me, were local and two others had just moved out of the area). I fasted for the next day and a half. The Yemen Caf is one of three Yemeni restaurants among a good dozen or so Arab restaurants, bakeries and groceries towards the western end of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. The neighbourhood has long been Arab, though traditionally the Arabs have been mostly Syrian and Lebanese Christian, with Muslims and Yemenis more recent arrivals. A grocery store called Sahadi's has anchored the block since 1948. The Damascus Bakery next door celebrated its 70th birthday last year. We make our latest visit to the Yemen Caf more or less on the spur of the moment. Its one of those soupy, miasmic New York summer nights when you can feel the microbial rot ooze down your throat with each breath. The restaurant looks about as wilted as I feel. Only three of the dozen tables are occupied, though I can tell from the litter of grease, soda cans and chicken bones that somebody has just left another one. A group of men stands around the tea urn at the back, laughing and trading jokes: they all work here, I think, though at a family-run place like this you can never quite tell employees from cousins from friends. One of them breaks away from the group and shows us to a (clean) table, bearing Styrofoam cups of steaming tea.
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The Damascus Bakery

I know people believe hot tea is good in hot weather because it promotes sweating and therefore cooling. But alas, to my dry-cleaners delight, my sweating has never needed promotion. Still, the tea tastes goodsweet and bitter, with hints of mints, cardamom and cinnamonand Im across the table from my wife, who is well enough acquainted with me to know I'm not having a heart attack, nor have I been sitting under a running sprinkler: its just July. The waiter takes our order on the back of an envelope holding a bill, and we choose judiciously, uncertain of just how much extra food will be thrust upon us. Our first choice for dinner, the aseed, is unavailable. I suspect someones grandmother didnt make it into the kitchen, because this is a comforting granny-type dish somewhere between a dumpling and a polenta-like porridge topped with a meat gravy. It evokes African dishes such as fufu or ugali; at times like these you look from map to menu and see how and why Yemeni cuisine has such hidden delights. Chicken curry also appears on any authentically Yemeni menu: a gift from the spice traders who sailed across the Arabian Sea to and from India. We choose a different gift from the spice traders: ghallabah, a saut of lamb, tomatoes and okra served over rice, and salta, a thick meat and vegetable stew that comes to the table bubbling in a cast-iron pot. The base of salta is fenugreek seeds left in water until they thicken and become gelatinous; more sodden fenugreek is whipped into the consistency and appearance of egg white and drizzled over the top right before serving. Before the main courses arrive, though, there are the extrasbowls of lamb consomm and salad. I have the same reaction to the soup as to the tea: I dont want it...I dont want it...this is so good I cant stop eating it! It tastes of lemon, lamb, onion and a ships worth of spices. It tastes like it will make you healthy, and I could drink it by the gallon. As for the salad, well, what can you say about chopped iceberg lettuce and tomato, however full of garlic and coriander the dressing? It tasted virtuous, and like the 1950s. Our main courses arrive shortly. We eat the salta by tearing chunks from the hubcap-sized, blistered, hot pita and dipping them in the stew. I forgot I had ordered not just the salta, but the salta with roast lamb, and my resolve flags a bit as the waiter brings a plate with a few fist-sized hunks of lamb shank. It comes off the bone in fibrous strings, as it should, but it is a bit bland. Better to use it as the filling for an impromptu sandwich: a chunk of pita dipped in the stew and wrapped around a string of shank.

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Despite (or thanks to) our best efforts, we eat ourselves into a stupor, but only a mild one. As we get up and walk to the front, through the window we see a group of Yemeni teenage boyswispy moustaches, gawky posturing, Yankees capson the stoop leading from the restaurant to the street. Theyre huddled close together, their backs to both the restaurant and the street, speaking intently. I cant catch what theyre saying, or even what language theyre speaking, until we pass them, and one of them points at a stocky guy about their age, also presumably Yemeni, across the street. Look at that fat-ass knucklehead, he says in Brooklynese as thick as an Italian grandpas. Cant hold a f----- job for s---.

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