Lebanese Exuberance Meets Brooklyn Cool at Sawa
The New York Times
A new restaurant in Park Slope serves elegant Levantine classics with a dash of hipster style and some New York pluck.
When Samaya Boueri Ziade moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn, in 2009, she found no restaurants with exactly the sort of Lebanese food she remembered from her hometown, Tabarja, a coastal village north of Beirut. So she thought about opening one herself.
She could picture it — a welcoming place with creamy white walls and pops of Mediterranean blue, serving a mix of beloved Lebanese classics (hummus, tabbouleh and kibbe) and less-famous regional dishes, sweetened with pomegranate molasses, soured with sumac, perfumed with allspice. There would be a garden with a fig tree, roses and grapevines, so she could harvest the new green leaves in summer to stuff with chickpeas and rice. It would be the Lebanon of her childhood.
That Lebanon is hard to discern today, after years of internal strife and economic collapse, and now the devastation from Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah.
But Ms. Boueri Ziade kept the dream alive. She raised two kids, occasionally hosting Levantine pop-ups around the city. The longer she lived in Brooklyn, the more it entered her bloodstream — the borough’s style, verve and grit melding with her Lebanese nature. By the time she opened Sawa last April with her brother, George Boueri, she’d changed.
Sawa is the essence of that evolution, and you can see it on the menu. Though firmly anchored in Lebanese cuisine, it has an element of temperate-zone seasonality, a dash of hipster cool and some New York pluck layered into the elegant Levantine originals. It’s Beirut by way of Brooklyn, but via the local.
This inimitable balance is evident in the fattoush salad, where local Little Gem lettuces and grilled nectarines mingle with the usual red onions, cucumbers, purslane and crisp pita, for an exuberant expression of the dish.
The reality star who rose to fame on “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” is being investigated for domestic violence along with the father of one of her children.
A new study found that women who went through so-called premature menopause had 40 percent more fatal and nonfatal heart attacks over the course of their lives.
In a stroke of luck, astronomers saw the comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) break into four or five fragments in November after it passed close to the sun.
New A.I. bots can do more than just chat. They can edit files, send emails, book trips and cause trouble.
The series, “inspired” by the story of a royal dresser later convicted of murder, is getting added attention over the former Duchess of York’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Lawyers for both sides in the federal lawsuit, brought by six medical organizations, are trying to understand the ramifications of the judge’s decision.
Andy Weir discusses his science-fueled novel “Project Hail Mary,” which has been adapted into a film that opens in theaters on Friday.
After years of criticism and financial risk, Palantir, Anthropic and small start-ups are generating rewards from their investments in defense tech.
In a legal filing, the government said it questioned whether the A.I. start-up could be a “trusted partner” in wartime, which led it to label the company a supply chain risk.
Before humanity sent satellites, telescopes, humans and weapons into space, Robert Goddard experimented with the first liquid-fueled rocket on his aunt’s farm.
A draft State Department memo outlines ways the Trump administration may ratchet up pressure on the African country by ending health support “on a massive scale.”
A Florida bill that would have regulated artificial intelligence, backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, failed to gain traction after President Trump made it clear he did not want states to rein in the technology.
The series, “inspired” by the story of a royal dresser later convicted of murder, is getting added attention over the former Duchess of York’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.