A night at the Yemen Café

I HAVE heard people express doubts about the Yemen Café. 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 food - the bathrooms are clean, a sure sign of a clean kitchen - but 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 owner - a jolly, balding, moustachioed man who looks like he has caused the demise of many a flock himself - brought 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 Café 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 Café more or less on the spur of the moment. It's 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.

I know people believe hot tea is good in hot weather because it promotes sweating and therefore cooling. But alas, to my dry-cleaner's delight, my sweating has never needed promotion. Still, the tea tastes good - sweet and bitter, with hints of mints, cardamom and cinnamon - and I'm 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: it's 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 someone's grandmother didn't 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 saute 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 extras - bowls of lamb consomme and salad. I have the same reaction to the soup as to the tea: “I don't want it...I don't want it...this is so good I can't stop eating it!” It tastes of lemon, lamb, onion and a ship's 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.

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 boys - wispy moustaches, gawky posturing, Yankees caps - on the stoop leading from the restaurant to the street. They're huddled close together, their backs to both the restaurant and the street, speaking intently. I can't catch what they're saying, or even what language they're 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 grandpa's. “Can't hold a f----- job for s---.”
Google Map for Yemen Café

(This post first appeared as an entry in a Correspondent's Diary written for Economist.com)