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The Japanese Sweet Potatoes were the sleeper hit at a recent dinner I shared with friends at the compact Italian-American joint Don Angie in New York City’s West Village. Drizzled with creamy Italian dressing (no surprise there), the dish was spiked and balanced with tart, astringent sumac and we fought over every morsel.
A week later, I’m home in Hawai’i, perusing the menus of Honolulu’s hottest, cheffiest restaurants. Scanning Anthony Rush and Christopher Kajioka’s a la carte menu at Senia, technically New American, but deeply informed by Hawai’i’s abundant natural resources, roasted parsnips dressed with ginger yoghurt and dukkah catch my eye.
Sumac, dukka, and also, toum, za’atar, labne, harissa. The past decade has seen these ingredients – and sometimes just these ingredients in name – woven amongst the pesto, crudo, tataki and tartares of the new New American menus.
Eggplant with majadra (lentils and rice) at Cedar’s Cafe. Photo courtesy of Toni Elkhouri.
New American is an elastic definition. It can be melded to suit a chef of practically any background, and diners might know what to expect. A succession of tapas that are not at all Spanish in origin, a hand-wrought pasta, perhaps, though the restaurant need not be Italian. Something including “uni” rather than “sea urchin” despite no discernible Japanese influence. ‘New American’ denotes “a chef is translating their food experiences in a fine dining format” and these days to me, New American means “there is probably za’atar somewhere on the menu.”
Menu language changes. It evolves to embrace terms that stretch the general public and widen their tastes. It elucidates, obscures (sometimes the sexiest menus hold the least information and diners lunge for their phones to Google what they’re eating), and at best, educates.
Menus are not immune to the 'Ottolenghi Effect,' which brought Middle Eastern cuisines into very non-Middle Eastern homes. But restaurant menus need to constantly stay ahead of the dining public and so I was curious how longtime Middle Eastern chefs and restaurateurs perceived this linguistic shift on New American menus, for instance using the word “labne” on a non-Middle Eastern menu over “strained yoghurt”? Or even the term “hummus”?
A selection of dishes at Cedar’s Cafe, including authentic hummus. Photo courtesy of Toni Elkhouri.
“Hummus was the reason the girl sitting next to me in third grade told me my breath made her want to barf. Eight-year-old questionable hygiene coupled with pre-noon consumption of garlic-flavoured dip aside, hummus wasn’t the household name it is today. It wasn’t long after this embarrassing moment that I started seeing versions of the ‘chickpea jam’ all over the place. Maybe it was TGI Friday’s. Maybe it was ShopRite. It was so long ago. My guess is that my reaction was equal parts shock and awe,” says Elias Bitar, the President of his family companies, EMZ Corp and Norma’s Restaurant Group. “Since about a decade before I was even born, Bitar has been a household name in the Middle Eastern foodscape, and the Philly food scene in general. My nursery was a Lebanese grocery. My playpen was our bakery,” he explains. Basically, if you’re from Philadelphia or Cherry Hill and you’ve looked for Middle Eastern food, Bitar’s family has served you.
“Cross-pollination is crucial to adaptation. It ought to be welcomed. But it should be rooted in substance. There must be respect and understanding for the processes involved and the context from whence they came. I have seen success and failure in the realm of ingredient adoption. If you call something ‘harissa’, I’ve got a pretty strong and narrow idea of what to expect. But the word simply means ‘crushed’, as in the crushed peppers and other ingredients that go into making it. And, of course, some people will swear that it has to have a certain specific fermentation, and others will demand an orthodox hierarchy of peppers. Where restaurants lose me is calling something ‘harissa’ and all I taste is a home version of Frank’s Red Hot. I’m not down with purity tests, but Tabasco ain’t the Tunisian good-good,” says Bitar.
But Bitar is generous and does not withhold the food terminology he holds dear. “An awesome example of not failing my ancestors comes from my fellow Cherry Hillians, New American gem The Farm and Fisherman Tavern. They make a broccoli falafel that’s absolutely out of this world. It makes sense to call it that, because it tastes like falafel, first and foremost. Then the slight taste deviations get picked up. But not before I check off cumin, coriander… of course the specified falafel textures, inside and out. It’s really quite beautiful, and I’m very happy to enjoy their homage.”
Mushroom kafta at Cedar’s Cafe. Photo courtesy of Toni Elkhouri.
Chef Toni Elkhouri has been running her restaurant, Cedar’s Cafe, in Melbourne, Florida for 18 years. She shares Bitar’s sentiments. “This started in the early 2000s, when our ingredients took flight.” Elkhouri has not only seen an evolution of menu vocabulary but an evolution in diners’ palates. “Eight years ago, it was hard for me to source pomegranate juice to make pomegranate molasses. Now I can get pomegranate molasses at Whole Foods,” she says.
Elkhouri has faced a constant battle in illustrating nuance on her menus. “Everyone tries to lump us together into one flavour profile. I’m a northern Lebanese chef in an area that’s mostly southern Lebanese.” The battle has only widened in scope over the years.
“Can you describe to me a moment when you noticed an ingredient you were surprised to see out of context?” I ask her.
Elkhouri recalls two instances. “I went to a steakhouse in 2019 – I’m a vegetarian, but I went with a group of people – and they had an eggplant dish they called baba ganoush. I was intrigued. The chef and the Middle Easterner in me asked ‘are they just culturally appropriating?’ And I thought, ‘as long as it tastes good, I don’t care.’ And they charred the eggplant, kept the skin in there – great. But I did ask, but where’s the tahini? And they said oh we don’t use that. So, I said, this is called mutabal, which means “to mix” – this is not baba ganoush.” But Elkhouri’s judgement leaves a lot of room for creativity. “Then there was a time I went into a bagel shop in Missouri, and they had za’atar bagels and they were amazing!”
She sees a “disconnect – a lot of the words we use to name our food has to do with the methodology of how it’s made. Or the main ingredient in it. My pet peeve is when someone calls something ‘hummus’ that has no chickpeas in it. ‘Hummus’ means ‘chickpea.’ Just because it’s pureed, and you have tahini in it doesn’t make it hummus.” This misunderstanding of terms is what she finds disturbing on menus. “Use Google Translate! Find out what the word means!” she urges. “Otherwise, you’re not respecting our culture, you’re just using trendy buzzwords. We’re a culture, not a trend.”
Hibiscus atayef at Cedar’s Cafe. Photo courtesy of Toni Elkhouri.
Those who name ingredients for home cooks and chefs, like Ethan Frisch, co-founder and co-CEO of Burlap & Barrel, are constantly educating. The mission of his company is the “redistribution of wealth from the global north to the global south” and Burlap & Barrel redistributes by engaging with farmers directly, paying them well above market price and selling their spices to an avid audience of adventurous cooks. Some of the spices and blends mentioned so far in this article are amongst Burlap & Barrel’s bestsellers. “We give all of our spices a unique name that references the origin or technique. Because they really are different. We’re trying to illustrate that difference through the naming.”
Frisch names the restaurant Sunday in Brooklyn as an example of the widening of the American spice palate. “They have a good tourist crowd, and they buy a lot of our [Turkish] silk chilli and black urfa chilli. But they also buy a lot of chipotle and Kashmiri chilli and do not associate them with any specific cuisine. This speaks to the tastes of their customers.”
Burlap & Barrel also manages a devoted, enthusiastic, and enormous Facebook group of customers and fans, mostly home cooks showing off their spice racks and their dish creations, while trading recipes and tips. The group is marked by “openness and interest.” “We launched iru [fermented locust bean] – not something most Americans had experience with,” says Frisch. “And people come up with all kinds of ideas…You put an interesting ingredient in the hands of a skilled home cook and it's all about the joy of experimentation.”
Sometimes that ingredient is a spice blend like Burlap & Barrel’s collaborations with Chef Reem Assil: Baharat, Khalta Hara and Za’atar.
Frisch is animated as he speaks about how people can discover the world behind ingredients. “If you want to cook, say, West African food, pick a few ingredients!”
I’ll leave you with these exhortations: Discover! Make delicious food! Use Google Translate!
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