Drink it in

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/04/2016 (3461 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the days immediately after 9/11, overseas flights were grounded and most tourists cancelled their trips to Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere.

I happened to be in Slovakia on that day, en route to Israel via Hungary. After arriving in Tel Aviv on a flight from Budapest — one of the first after European airports reopened — I found a country normally crawling with tourists practically devoid of visitors.

Within a few days, I was in Jerusalem. The old city, one of the most popular destinations on the planet, was like a ghost town. In the Muslim Quarter, despondent vendors half-heartedly tried to hawk their wares to a small smattering of passersby.

I was able to sit down at a small café on Suq-El-Qatanin Street, a narrow corridor west of the Temple Mount, and have a cup of tea within sight of the Dome of the Rock. The eerie quiet remains a vivid memory.

So does the beverage itself: strong black tea, sweetened with lots of sugar and steeped with a few leaves of what Palestinians call nana, the highly aromatic spearmint of North Africa and the Middle East. This is the midday beverage I crave on warm summer afternoons. I typically make it at home, using leaves from a Moroccan spearmint plant I purchase in the spring from a garden store.

But there’s an approximation available to anyone, all year, at Ramallah Café, a small Pembina Highway Palestinian restaurant located a few blocks south of Corydon Avenue, in the Earl Grey neighbourhood.

This unassuming little place is a classic hole-in-the-wall, with five small tables in a casual seating area up front. Less conventionally, there’s more lavish seating in a backroom lounge intended for patrons who come to smoke shisha, the fruit-flavoured molasses concoction, out of hookah pipes for $10.99 a pop.

This alcohol-free restaurant is open on weekends until 4 a.m. During the day, the chief attractions are the sandwiches and a few other Middle Eastern touches uncommon in Winnipeg.

Most of Ramallah’s sandwiches come in a choice of a rolled-up pita or a saj, the latter a thin Middle Eastern flatbread also known as markook. Unlike pita, which is usually baked in an oven, saj is cooked on a concave open griddle of the same name. 

The resulting bread is light, chewy and pliable, not unlike a flour tortilla cooked on a comal, the flat open griddle found in Mexico. Ramallah doesn’t make its own saj on site, but no matter: it forms the perfect wrapper for an extremely light sandwich of house-made labneh, or strained yogurt, and sour Arabic cucumber pickles.

There are also slightly more substantial pita or saj sandwiches of grilled chicken or beef, billed on the menu as shawarma. They’re far more dainty than the gut-busting, torpedo-like shawarma that have become ubiquitous in recent years, so be warned if you’re expecting serious sustenance.

A lentil-carrot soup, puréed to a creamy consistency, is both subtle and homey. Even better is the Ramallah Café salad, a simple mixture of lettuce, arugula, goat cheese, walnuts and cashews, dressed with lemon juice and olive oil.

For dessert, there’s baklavah supplied by Food Fair and also the far less common sahlab, which is sweet milk thickened with the starchy flour of ground orchid tubers. Yes, orchid tubers. It’s halfway between a beverage and a thin, warm pudding.

Ramallah’s beverages are worth a visit, as long as you have some time and patience. Arabic coffee is strained cowboy coffee, laced with cardamom. The Turkish version is unstrained.

Black tea with mint, the drink that attracted me in the first place, is served in a stainless-steel teapot that holds enough liquid for three full cups. Black tea with sage is also available. There’s also zhourat tea, which isn’t tea at all, but a mix of lemon balm, chamomile, Damask rose and other wildflowers and herbs. The menu also lists an array of (unsampled) non-alcoholic, fruit-based cocktails.

While you’re having tea, the view of Pembina Highway doesn’t quite match that of the Dome of the Rock, but the scent of shisha should be enough to transport anyone who misses the Middle East.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca