Written by James Brennan
Most people visit Jordan to ogle at its historical sites and float in the Dead Sea, stopping in Amman only for a brief visit. But should you spend a little longer in the capital city, there’s a host of culinary delights to discover.
The old man’s face is as wrinkled and leathery as his desert truffles. Yusef stands there most days, watching over his side-street grocery stall as the glaring sun adds layers of character to his grin. “Eat the desert truffle like a mushroom,” he says. “Squeeze the juice into your eyes. It’s good for your eyes.”
Round a corner a clutch of sugar cane juts from a tin bucket outside a drinks kiosk. A sign lists the health benefits of the juice: ‘preventing arteries stiffness, cleaning chest, sexual supporter…’
In Jordan, it seems, everything you eat or drink is an aid to vigour, wellbeing or social interaction. The hungry lunchtime huddle outside Amman’s famous Reem Cafeteria (+962 464 5725, 2nd Circle, Jebel Amman) shawarma joint hums with friendly chit-chat as they wait for the meat to be carved. The place is renowned across Jordan, not just for serving up some of the best shawarmas in the Levant, but also for being a favourite of King Abdullah himself.
A king eating a shawarma. It’s an image that encapsulates the spirit of food in Jordan. Nothing is considered too low rent. If it tastes good enough, it’s fit for royalty. Even the humblest of Arabic street foods, the falafel, is imbued with a sense of backstreet reverence at the legendary Hashem Restaurant (Al-Amir Mohammed St, Downtown Amman). The ‘dining room’ amounts to a cluster of plastic garden furniture in a bland alleyway, but its golden brown falafel, velvety hummus and heart-warming ful medammes are nothing short of regal.
Amman is full of institutions like Hashem. Independent family restaurants, loved by young and old, are scattered all across this city of nooks, hills and wandering roads. Just across the street from Hashem is Al Quds (+962 463 0168, Al-Malek al-Hussein St), where some of the most hearty examples of traditional bedouin cuisine can be found. The mansaf here is famous throughout the city. The dish of lamb or chicken and rice is doused with ‘jameed’ dried yoghurt, which is mixed with hot water and made into a heavy but delicious sauce.
Mansaf is what the bedouin have been offering guests and travellers for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. Traditionally served on a huge platter and eaten communally, always with the right hand, it is a symbol of humanity and hospitality in an inhospitable environment. Tourists passing through the beautiful arid sand-scapes of Wadi Rum can enjoy al fresco feasts with bedouin hosts under the stars. But there are countless tales of independent travellers being taken in and fed by kind strangers without any tourist dinars changing hands.
Jordan’s cuisine is as much about its bountiful produce and Ottoman influenced delicacies as its simple bedouin origins. Another of Amman’s institutions is Zalatimo Sweets (Rivoli Plaza, Shmeisani, www.zalatimosweets.com), purveyors of luxury Arabic pastries and baklava. The family business was started in 1860 in Jerusalem by the great, great grandfather of the current general manager of Abdallah Zalatimo. It has expanded across Jordan to include European-style cakes and chocolates, but the traditional baklava - around 45 varieties - never veers too far away from its roots.
“A lot of the cuisine in Jordan has been influenced by the close ties with Palestine. It’s almost like one country,” says Zalatimo. “But both countries were very much developed by the Ottomans. Their empire was vast and culturally diverse. We were influenced by the gifts brought for the Sultan. He’d say to his head chef, here I got a new spice, give it a roll. That’s when fusion started happening.”
The building blocks of fusion can be found in the souqs around Amman’s vibrant Hashemi Street. Spice shops have dunes of cumin and paprika sitting under loops of dried lemons hung from the rafters. Mounds of fresh parsley and coriander roll like green fields opposite bloody butcher’s shop displays. A shark’s head dangles on a hook outside a fishmongers, and everywhere people are munching on fresh green almonds, young and tart and sprinkled with salt.
For a country that’s is 90 percent desert, Jordan’s produce is surprisingly diverse. “In the coastal parts you have a lot of produce, vegetables, fruit from the orchards, oranges, cherries, grapes and grape leaves,” Zalatimo explains.
Madaba is where some of the best organic vineyards in the Middle East can be found, but you don’t have to leave the capital to have a taste. The Winemaker (Wadi Saqra, www.zumot-wines.com) has up to 34 varieties of award-winning bottles, from pinot noir to sauvignon blanc.
The man behind the vines is Omar Zumot, who started out 15 years ago with nothing but a bit of land and boundless determination. “In Jordan previously the wine was not of a high quality, and I wanted to produce something that’s really Jordanian, that’s really got character and its own personality,” says Zumot. “The problem I faced was that there was nobody before me who planted grapes, so I didn’t know what to plant or where.”
Through dogged trial and error, and using as many different grape varieties as possible, Zumot succeeded in creating a natural product that has won plaudits from tasters around the world, not to mention some 15 international medals. “What’s my secret? I do nothing,” teases Zumot. “When you do nothing, you allow nature to express itself, and nature can give you much more than 34 different flavours. Our strength is in how we grow the grapes. All of it is organic. We’ve never used any pesticides. We fertilize with different techniques. And every year our wine is better - not because we know better how to make wine, but because our roots are deeper, and our soil is richer and more alive.”
Roots go deep when it comes to food and drink in Jordan. Beit Sitti (+962 795 633 868, www.beitsittijo.com) is a restaurant and cookery school that’s all about upholding traditional homemade recipes and teaching them to a generation of Jordanians who are losing touch with their heritage.
“The art is being lost,” says owner Maria Hadad. “It’s not being handed down from generation to generation because women aren’t getting the chance to teach these recipes to their kids. So what we’re trying to do is bring it back. It’s funny because you see women that are 40 or 50 that come to learn. They are tired of not knowing how to do this. So we have all different ages.”
Set in a beautiful townhouse in the Jebel Weibdeh district of Amman, the initiative concentrates on the type of food that can’t be found in many of Jordan’s restaurants. “We originally started for tourists, but then we found that it’s really popular with locals as well,” explains Hadad. “Locals really enjoy homemade food. They really want to learn how to make it because you can’t get it in restaurants. They’re probably newlyweds who are sick of ordering out, so they want to learn how to make Arabic food.”
An evening session at Beit Sitti will teach you how to make four courses from scratch - a mezze, a salad, a main dish and a dessert. Guests are shown how to prepare and cook aubergines on an open flame to make the smokiest moutabel dip imaginable. And for the main course, spices are blended with layers of tomatoes and chicken to make an aromatic rice dish called maqlooba.
A huge pan is stuffed to the brim and simmered slowly before being turned over onto a vast platter - ‘maqlooba’ means ‘upside down’ in Arabic. By the time you get round to dessert, you might also wish to learn the phrase for ‘please, stop feeding me, I’m about to explode.’
“As Arabs we’re very hospitable and portions are always huge,” says Hadad. She tells a story about a journey King Abdullah and Prince Hassan once made on camelback in the desert. They came upon a bedouin tent, and were invited in for a large lunch.
“When they were leaving, the King found out that the guy had killed his only camel to feed them. So the King bought him 30 times what he had given up. People would really feed their guests rather than themselves or their family.”
