It is not easy to trace the roots of the Arabic community in Los Angeles, though it would seem fairly certain that our local Middle Eastern populace followed fairly close upon the heels of the Arabic migration into New York City.
According to Zelda Stern’s excellent volume, “The Complete Guide to Ethnic New York,” New York’s Arab community goes back to the 1870s, to the man known as the “Syrian Columbus.” His name was Moses David, and he’s believed to be the first Arab settler in New York and perhaps in the whole United States.
The first real wave of Arab immigration didn’t come until the 1890s, when many Syrians, fleeing the Ottoman Empire, arrived first in New York, and then fanned out across America. After World War II, economic problems in Lebanon brought a second great wave of Syrians and Lebanese. They were followed in due time by a steady trickle of Palestinians, Egyptians, Iraqis, Jordanians, Yemenis and Arabic-speaking Armenians from Lebanon.
While New York’s Arabic community is dominated by Syrians and Lebanese, judging from the restaurants here in Los Angeles (restaurants are always a good barometer of population’s distribution) the community is made up mostly of Lebanese and Armenians.
Though there is a smattering of restaurants representative of the other parts of the Arabic world, the chances are that when you eat in a Middle Eastern restaurant here in Los Angeles, the dishes will be either Lebanese or Armenian; and since the differences between the two styles of cooking may not be all that evident, they may seem, functionally, like the same cuisine.
After the foods of the Far East (the variety of which is, for all due purposes, virtually endless), my favorite culinary region is the Middle East. It’s fun to watch as different dishes pass through the many cultural filters in the region, as stuffed grape leaves, and things made with garbanzo beans, change sometimes subtly, and sometimes radically as they cross national and linguistic borderlines.
Middle Eastern food may be many things, but boring is definitely not one of them. I’ve long believed that falafel would be nature’s most perfect food. But then, at our many Middle Eastern options, there’s hummus as well — which may be even more perfect. And did I mention baba ghanoush? My addiction to Middle Eastern cooking runs deep. And, fortunately, there are many options for deliciously feeding those cravings — especially at these restaurants:
285 E. 3rd St., Long Beach; 562-435-0808, www.ammatoli.com
Getting a rotisserie chicken is certainly one of the easiest ways of ordering at Ammatoli. You have a choice of a quarter white or a quarter dark, a half, a whole, or a family chicken feast of two birds. The first options come with a choice of two side dishes; the last comes with four, drawn from crowd-pleasers like the hummus and the spicy hummus, the tahini salad and (for a bit extra) the tabbouleh, the grape leaves, the baba ghanoush and more.
There’s a spicy, garlic, lemon chicken as well, half a bird with rice and two sides, which may actually be even better than the standard-issue rotisserie chicken, though that does strain credibility. Or at least the capacity of my taste buds.
And in terms of the menu, that’s just the proverbial tip of the Middle Eastern iceberg. (I know — a bizarrely mixed metaphor!) Indeed, Ammatoli approaches the encyclopedic in terms of its selection of dishes. One can, of course, as always, make a perfectly good meal out of nothing but the mezza — the small dishes — which come (if you want) as a six-dish combo, or a three dishes combo. A meal of hummus, tabbouleh, grape leaves, fried lamb kibbeh, falafel — what’s not to love?
I’m especially fond of the hummus variation, topped with a choice of meats and pine nuts — ground beef, shawarma beef or shawarma chicken, it doesn’t much matter to me, for they’re all good. And I love the way the innate creaminess of the hummus lays off the semi-soft crunch of the pine nuts, and the salty-crispiness of the meats, sort of a celebration on your tongue. And the fried cauliflower, tossed with scallions and parsley makes cauliflower taste about as good as cauliflower can taste.
But if you’re in the need of more, certainly the lamb, chicken, beef steak, and ground beef kabobs are a source of much happiness. If you want to get away from the familiar, try the dish called samkeh harra, a grilled fish filet marinated in an unexpectedly spicy habanero pepper sauce. Habaneros? In the Middle East? Well, why not? There’s a Moroccan spiced salmon as well, sweetly described on the menu as “Your True Hearty Choice!!” A true hearty odd turn of phrase, complete with double exclamation marks!
Boubouffe Mediterranean Grill
5313 E. 2nd St., Long Beach; 562-433-7000, www.boubouffelongbeach.com
You can have a lamb burger for breakfast at Boubouffe Mediterranean Grill. Now, I know that sounds like a funny thing to say. But on a menu of waffles and pancakes and omelettes — well, a lamb burger is the odd dish out. I guess it’s kind of breakfast, since it comes topped with a fried egg. And a fried egg does say breakfast in a loud voice.
That said, next to the several omelettes made with spinach, mushrooms, tomatoes and feta cheese — well, a lamb burger is a bit different. And for those wanting something other than the same old same old — well, it’s a pleasant diversion. Though breakfast is largely American in its tone, lunch and dinner head for the Med, with a good selection of small mezze, larger salads, and even larger kebabs.
First and foremost, it’s the mezze I love, for like many of us here in SoCal, I gladly opt for many small tastes, rather than one big taste. (It has something to do with our short attention spans, which in turn have something to do with the hours we spend stuck on the freeways. I think.)
Pretty much everything they serve at Boubouffe comes with a basket of steaming hot pita bread, which is so much more…soothing than an ordinary basket of generic air bread. This is bread with substance. And that substance is amplified with warmth. It starts the meal off very well.
And so do the several hummus variations — all of which are served together on the Hummus Combo plate, with regular chickpea hummus, spiced chili and chickpea hummus, and a hummus that isn’t really a hummus (strictly speaking), but counts as a dip, made with white beans and rosemary. There’s our old friend baba ghanoush as well — a dip of grilled eggplant.
By dips alone can you live well at Boubouffe. But then, you’d be missing the North African peppers, which are round like sweet Cajun peppers, filled with feta cheese and drizzled with balsamic — a very good dish, with an abundance of flavors. Some tabouli and stuffed grape leaves wouldn’t hurt either. Almost all of which are found on the Cold Mezze Taster — baba ghanoush, hummus, peppers, tabouli and grapple leaves. More than this, you hardly need.
3580 Long Beach Blvd., Long Beach; 562-912-7030, www.thegreenolivelb.com
The Green Olive is probably the best Middle Eastern restaurant in a liquor store I’ve ever come across. It’s also the only Middle Eastern restaurant in a liquor store I’ve encountered. But in a world of infinite possibilities, there are almost certainly others.
The Green Olive sits inside Liquor Land — which is quite the place. While you wait for your food to emerge from the kitchen, meander around, admiring the remarkably eclectic assortment of wines, liquors and liqueurs, mixers and snacks. There are things on the shelves here I’ve never seen before — including an encyclopedic selection of vodkas and tequilas. It’s quite the place. But then, The Green Olive is quite the restaurant.
Do I want the charbroiled beef cube kabob, or the charbroiled ground beef kabob — the kofta? How about the lamb and beef gyro combination, versus the lamb and beef gyro with falafels? Or the mixed grill combo of beef cubes, chicken chunks and ground kofta? So many possibilities, all of them worth ordering. And honestly, I’m glad for all those combos, for those of us who can’t make up our minds or our appetites, there are many ways of getting a bit of everything.
Order, for instance, the combo called The Superior — chicken kabobs and lamb kibbeh, with spicy beef meatballs — and, of course, rice and salad, and hummus and pita bread along with the garlicky house green sauce, reminiscent of South American chimichurri.
Consider the Combo Trio of chicken, kofta and shrimp kabobs — or for those in the mood or with the need, the Vegetarian Platter of hummus, baba ghanoush, tabouli, falafel, stuffed grape leaves, pita and green sauce. It’s a lot of food.
I really like the fattoush salad, always have, which is something of a deconstructed, reassembled nacho platter, without the cheese or the guac. Instead, the tortilla chips are replaced with toasted pita chips, very tasty, tossed with lettuce, tomato, cucumber, scallions, peppers, radish — and a smattering of sumac powder, a Middle Eastern standard, with a subtle peppery flavor.
The chilled yogurt with diced cucumbers, garlic and mint is pretty great too. The spicy home style potatoes were tasty — but they needed to be crisper. And yes, potatoes are an oddity in Middle Eastern cooking. But then, so is being in a liquor store, in a mini-mall shared with The Pan, and its oversized omelettes and pancakes. This is the sort of confluence of culinary options that make dining here in Southern California so much fun. You never know what you’ll find next door — or for that matter, in the same space with the kabobs and falafel.
Gypsy’s Persian Grill
21 S. 39th Pl., Long Beach; 562-433-8850, www.gypsyspersiangrill.com
Despite its self-description as a “Persian Grill,” the menu skews more Mediterranean, toward falafel and hummus and tabouli. The many rices found at the restaurant of Little Tehran in West LA aren’t here — no tahdig, no torshi, no fesenjan. Instead, kabobs rule the menu — and they rule the menu very nicely too. The choices are basic, with a few tasty twists and turns.
It’s not surprise that there’s a chicken kabob, a beef kabob, a lamb kabob, a ground beef koobideh kabob, and even a salmon kabob. But the Turkish chicken kabob does come as a bit of an unexpected geographic twist — with a taste that makes you pause in your chewing, and go back to that first bite to see if you can figure out what the heck it is, you’ve just bit into. This is a chicken kabob in which the chicken isn’t just chargrilled, it’s also been marinated in a tasty mixture of yogurt and cinnamon, along with a bestiary of spices, giving it an almost shocking depth of flavor.
It’s served, as are all the kabobs, with a simple but very tasty pile of rice, and a choice of salads. I went with the tabouli, because it’s the most Med salad offered, and found it matched the chicken perfectly — a very good plate of food.
I don’t think you can go wrong with any of the dishes at Gypsy’s — there’s quality here of no-fail cooking, often found in Middle Eastern/Mediterranean restaurants. There’s also a sense of healthy dining that’s much appreciated, since it’s not hammered on, as it is at various organic, natural, veggie-intense places. Here — and in the cuisine in general — it just is. Lots of vegetables, lean protein, olive oil.
5215 E. 2nd St., Long Beach (Belmont Shore); 562-621-1698, www.opensesamegrill.com
Gaze, in wonder and anticipation, at the menu for Open Sesame — which also has a branch in downtown Los Angeles — and you’ll encounter words like “Slata,” “Shorba” and “Manousheh.” Which actually turn out to be a tad less exotic than they sound — though each of them is a hotbed of exotic preparations.
“Slata” is salad — and might I suggest either the fattoush or the tabbouleh, both of which are as good as they get. “Shorba” is soup, a wonder of a lentil soup, and a joy of a spicy vegetable soup, made with red and yellow lentils, great soothing broths to calm the soul as this plague drags on. “Manousheh” is where the real fun is — it’s a Lebanese style pizza, three of them, topped in one case with feta and zaatar, in another with sesame and sumac. This is not the sort of pizza found at your mini-mall pie shop. This is a journey very far away.
The mezza is, of course, a wonder and a joy — get the sampler with grape leaves, olives, hummus, tabbouleh, labne cheese and yogurt dip — by this alone one can live and carry on. Grilled halloumi cheese is served with watermelon, why I do not know, but it works. And so does the entree combo of chicken tawook, beef kabob, chicken or beef kafta, garlic sauce, parsley, sumac, basmati rice, pita bread and a choice of dips and salads. The Party Platter is for six people, perfect for a night of binge-watching “Hollywood.” Tasty all around.
Taboon Mediterranean
539 E. Bixby Road, Long Beach; 562-424-4774, taboon-mediterranean.business.site
The somewhat curious name refers to a Middle Eastern flatbread called taboon, which is also known as laffa, and is a cooked in a taboon oven, which is also known as a tannur, which is not coincidentally close to a tandoor oven. Lap and overlap, cuisines flow one into another. It’s also wondrously delicious, addictively so.
And one small section of dishes at Taboon are built around the bread — the taboon mushakhan, which is half a chicken cooked with sumac and red onions; a ground beef kefta casserole served with hummus and baba ghanoush; and a family meal of three cold appetizers, two hot appetizers and three proteins. This is a bread that carries much happiness with it. But then, so does the whole menu at Taboon, where the lamb chops are among the best I’ve ever eaten; I’ve tried to replicate them, and I’ve failed sadly.
They do great things with chicken at Taboon. And though it’s unexpected, their garlic heavy potato salad is worth ordering. Is potato salad a Middle Eastern dish? Does it matter, when you’re scraping the bottom of the container, hoping for one more taste?
Merrill Shindler is a Los Angeles-based freelance dining critic. Email mreats@aol.com.
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