Thinking about Syrian food (1)

I’ve wanted to write reviews about a number of Syrian restaurants in Damascus, especially in the Old City, but I’ve paused before doing so, because it’s hard to exactly how to do so. So let me first give a framework about Syrian food.

The first thing to note about Syrian food is that it can broadly be divided into three: street food, restaurant food and home food. There’s plenty of overlap, and the difference is not exactly clear cut, but it’s a useful way to proceed. I’m going to write about restaurant food today, and I’ll deal with street food (and with luck home food) later.

In Syrian restaurants menus are usually divided into cold appetisers (sometimes called mezze), hot appetisers, salads, mains (sometimes divided further into chicken, meat and fish), and desserts. Occasionally, especially at restaurants with gourmet aspirations, you’ll find pastas and pizzas.

‘Appetisers’ include hummous (sometimes also hot and with meat), mutabbal, muhammara and baba ghanouj, eaten with flatbread. The salads include fatoush, tabouleh, rocket salad, and oriental salad (no bean sprouts though, it’s more of a seasonal salad), and if the place is better, you will also find things like tuna salad, corn salad and so on. Kibbeh (balls of minced lamb with nuts and coated in bulger wheat) come grilled, fried or even sometimes raw. A selection of appetisers and salads can be enough for a nice meal. But for a ‘proper’ Syrian meal, you have to move on to mains.

In the ‘Mains’ section of the menu you’ll find shish taouk (chicken kebab), various mixed grills of marinated meat, steaks (beef and chicken) and often the perennially mis-spelled ‘cordon blue’ (sic.). They will be served with flatbread, chips, potato wedges, or sometimes rice. They may be accompanied by a small salad or vegetables (invariably courgettes and carrots with lots of butter). Sometimes at more adventurous restaurants you will find rice dishes on the menu, like kibseh or mansaf. This is rice, cooked in spices, with chicken or lamb, and sometimes also vegetables.

Most Syrian restaurants serve plates of fruit for desert, which is actually delicious. You may be lucky and get ice cream too. This will be washed down with tea or coffee, served short and with lots of sugar.

The good thing about Syrian restaurant food is that you know what you’re going to get. Variety is not prized, and quality is uniform (and good). The bad thing about Syrian restaurants is that there are no surprises; you will rarely, if ever, be wowed by something. If you are in Syria for a short time, you won’t mind, there will be enough different dishes to keep you amused. If you stay for longer, you may find that you quickly become bored; virtually no experimentation takes place and there is little imagination. You can compare the smokiness of the mutabbal in one restaurant to another, but that loses its lustre quickly. And it comes in addition to the fact that, since Syrian food comes with large dollops of oil, you can not enjoy your food and feel like you are doing damage to your body all at once. There are some really delicious Syrian foods (especially kibseh and mansaf) and some great raw materials (aubergines, olives, tahini), but Syrian restaurants can’t seem to put them together into an outstanding menu.

This is a shame, because restaurants that take Middle Eastern cuisine as a base and do good things with it can be outstanding, such as London’s Moro. As far as I can see there are two reasons for the stagnation. First, Syrian cooking knowledge resides with women, but restaurant chefs are always men, therefore the people with most potential to cook well are not doing so. (I don’t mean to say that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, incidentally, rather that it is a fact of Syrian society at this point in time that women do the coking at home.) Second, Syrian’s really like their food, and there is very little demand for someone to do innovative things with it—people go to the restaurants anyway. With a few exceptions (perhaps Naranj in Damascus), I don’t see things changing quickly.

(Also posted on Philip Blue's Blog.)