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Showing posts with label Dearborn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dearborn. Show all posts

Sunday, February 10, 2019

Eating Lebanese and Syrian Lunches in Detroit, Michigan by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Eating Lebanese and Syrian Lunches in Detroit, Michigan by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget


The following food memoir appeared in my “Side Dish” column in The Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) about eating in Detroit’s (Michigan) Levantine Restaurants during frigid winters.

Cold Comfort

When I was a child growing up in Detroit, my mother’s favorite thing to make for lunch or dinner was reservations.

This meant that at least once a month, we would eat at an Arab restaurant catering to Detroit’s Arab population of 350,000.  The Lebanese, Syrians, and Iraqis in this population had ancestors who had come to work in the auto factories in Detroit.

I liked the lamb and chicken shish kebabs that retained the tangy lemon and garlic flavor of their marinade as well as the shwarma (a sort of Levantine gyro), but I preferred to order an “ethnic” appetizer plate.

When the appetizer plate arrived, I would load up the pita pocket bread with the roasted eggplant purée called baba ghanouj.  The baba ghanouj was seasoned with pantry items we did not have at home like tahini (sesame seed paste), garlic, and lemon.

I liked the garnishes on this dish, too – salty, black olives, tomato slices, and chopped parsley.  Next, I would heap on some yellow chickpea purée, hummus, flavored with the same things as the baba ghanouj.

I would alternate between bites of the deep-fried falafel patties made with ground chickpeas, garlic, onions, and cumin with the best thing on the appetizer plate – tabbouleh.

Lebanese and Syrian tabbouleh features loads of chopped parsley, mint, tomatoes, and cucumbers with grains of burghal wheat that have soaked up lemony dressing.  You are supposed to eat falafel with a tahini dressing, but I think it tastes better with tabbouleh.

As my lunch entrée, I would order a bowl of shorbat ads soup made with puréed cannellini beans, chicken stock, garlic, and lemon juice.  The soup is presented to you with a swirl of extra virgin olive oil on top and paprika.

With this meal, I would drink lemonade flavored with orange blossom water.

For dessert, I would further demonstrate my youthful connoisseurship of “Levantine” food and skip the baklava to order a “bird’s nest” – a phyllo pastry with edges turned up to hold pistachio nuts.

Waiters would bring my mother her coffee brewed Levantine-style with cardamom pods in a pot on a brass tray suspended from three chains.

After a meal like this, you could almost feel the Mediterranean sun on your face in the subzero temperatures of a Michigan winter.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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