Chefs explore ingredients of Eastern MediterraneanChefs explore ingredients of Eastern Mediterranean

Bret Thorn

When Americans think of Mediterranean cuisine, what most often comes to mind is not-so-authentic Italian food, maybe with a bit of influence from Spain, Southern France or Greece. But more and more these days restaurateurs are looking a bit farther east for inspiration.

“The Eastern Mediterranean I think holds such a new experience for so many diners,” says Dallas chef-restaurateur Stephan Pyles, whose newest restaurant, Samar, devotes a whole section of its menu to the region.

Samar, like many new restaurants, focuses on small plates. Pyles originally planned on making it a Spanish tapas place, but decided that had been done. So Spanish food ended up being only one section of the menu. The other two are Indian and Eastern Mediterranean.

Pyles says the Eastern Mediterranean made for a good bridge between Spain and India.

More importantly, he says, “It’s food I love, and food we’ve always considered very healthy.”

Hummus was probably the breakthrough menu item that brought Eastern Mediterranean food to the mainstream American consciousness. From there, labneh, a soft cheese, started to take hold. Now restaurateurs report success with skewered kebabs, and kibbeh, a sort of dumpling made by combining ground meat and bulgur to make a crust and stuffing it with spiced meat.

In Washington, D.C., Zaytinya launched a special menu featuring the cuisine of Lebanon. The restaurant is run by chef-restaurateur José Andrés and represents the cuisines of Greece, Lebanon and Turkey.

“In the past we’ve done a lot of stuff around Greece,” says head chef Mike Isabella. “So this time we wanted to highlight Lebanon. It has great food and is tremendously influential in the region, he says.

Lebanon has long been influential in the Eastern Mediterranean. It was the center of the ancient Phoenician civilization, and many modern Lebanese take particular pride both in that heritage and in their cuisine.

At Zaytinya, Isabella is offering items such as butternut squash kadaif, or squash with pistachio, shredded phyllo known as kadaif, and “burnt honey,” which is made by heating honey in a skillet until it browns and cooks down a little, giving it a toasted flavor.

Another favorite of Isabella’s is mohammara, or slow-cooked chicken thigh with red bell pepper, pomegranate and walnuts.

Zaytinya’s customers are especially responsive to the various kibbehs he offers during his Flavors of Lebanon promotion, including chicken, potato, turkey and cuttlefish. He also makes his own version of kibbeh nayeh. Normally made with raw lamb or beef, Isabella makes his with raw fluke that he mixes with bulgur, mint, radish and smoked trout roe.

Traditional kibbeh nayeh is popular at Steve’s Backroom, a restaurant in Saint Clair Shores, Mich. There chef Charles Raffoul uses a combination of 20 percent lamb and 80 percent beef that he mixes with a spice mixture including cinnamon and allspice.

“The Muslims add cumin, but we don’t,” says Raffoul, who is a Lebanese Christian. He also adds salt, pepper, onions and bulgur.

Todd English, who has built his culinary reputation on Mediterranean food, is focusing especially on the Eastern Mediterranean for his latest project, Juliet Supperclub in New York, where he is consulting chef. Although lamb chops are on the menu, much of the food is mezze—small items.

“I’m kind of calling it nomadic tribe cuisine,” English says. “The food of the people who brought olives and olive oil through Europe. Juliet is a lounge, and it’s about sharing, and mezze is food that you share.”

Some of the items are traditional such as manti, tiny lamb dumplings in yogurt sauce. Others are what English calls “interpretive Mediterranean,” such as tuna tartare flavored with tabouleh, a salad made of parsley, bulgur, lemon and tomato.

He’s also making a falafel—spiced, deep-fried chickpea croquettes—flavored with toasted corn, lobster and brown butter.

Much of the food is Turkish at Pera Mediterranean Brasserie in New York.

“The core of the menu is very traditional Turkish preparations and ingredients,” says chef Jason Avery. “But I’ve gone to the next level as far as plating and presentation, and I’ve incorporated other parts of the Mediterranean—Spanish, North African—with a New York twist.”

An example of one of his invented dishes is a Portuguese style of crispy calamari with house-cured vinegared peppers. The Portuguese would add linguiça sausage to that, but instead he adds a Turkish sausage called sojouk. “It’s all beef, with paprika,” he says.

He does traditional lamb and chicken kebabs, but he’s also doing a duck one with a barbecue sauce made with pomegranate syrup—a common Middle Eastern condiment—fresh pomegranate, brown sugar, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, black pepper and a Turkish chile powder called marish. Avery compares marish to red pepper flakes.

“It’s a little bit moister and a deeper red, and larger flakes, and a little more full-flavored,” he says. “It gives some heat, but it also has other layers of flavor to it.”

A more traditional preparation is his adana kebab, which is made by removing all the silver skin from lamb meat as well as the fat. The meat from some of the leg and loin is finely ground, and then he takes “the real good fat, the soft almost iridescent fat”—the smooth kind that would melt when rendered rather than leaving gristle or cracklings behind—and hand chops that.

It’s all mixed with sea salt, Turkish chile powder and marish paste. That sits overnight and then is shaped onto a skewer. Avery suspends that over the restaurant’s grill to cook it more gently than if he put it right on the grill.

“In Turkey they have a trough with fresh charcoals, and it’s cooked by indirect heat,” Avery explains.

Elsewhere in New York, at Ali Baba’s Terrace, a sort of fine spiced beef jerky called basterma—the name has the same origins as pastrami—is mixed with kashar cheese and sliced tomato, wrapped in phyllo for a the Turkish dish pacangi boreci.

Chef Ed Witt is planning a restaurant in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood called Morso. The mostly small plate restaurant will focus on Turkish food, and the restaurant’s owner sent Witt to Turkey to study the food.

Witt will be doing his own take on the food, focusing on using local seasonal products.

“There’s not a ton of venison in Turkey, but I’ll probably do cold-smoked venison, seared, sliced and served with yogurt, pomegranate, walnut and a red pepper sauce,” he says.

Back in Dallas at Samar, Pyles says the city has plenty of good Middle-Eastern food, but it’s mostly in the suburbs. He hopes that by bringing it to the middle of the city, people will feel more comfortable with it.

“We have a hookah terrace,” Pyles says. A hookah is a water pipe used for smoking tobacco in the Middle East.

“People are fascinated by that, and although it exists in the Dallas suburbs, people would be intimidated to smoke it there, but smack in the middle of the arts district, they won’t,” he says.— [email protected]