Restaurant Review: This Outstanding Yemeni Kitchen Began With an Escape From War
The New York Times
Yemenat, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, offers Yemeni delights rarely found in New York City.
This is Pete Wells’s last review as restaurant critic for The Times. Read more about his 12 years of reviewing here.
Some restaurants are born when a young worker begins to feel more at home waiting tables or frying onions than any other place. Others start with dreams of stardom. Then there are restaurants that are opened by people who had no thought of cooking and serving food until the place they lived was taken over by men with guns.
Ala Al-Samawi, an owner and manager of a new restaurant in Brooklyn called Yemenat, was the creative director of his own design studio in Yemen’s capital, Sana, when the Houthi rebels seized control in 2014. The next year, when general chaos turned to personal threats, he left his home and family, carrying what he could fit in a backpack. Getting to New York City took three years, including a long period when the Trump administration banned refugees from Yemen.
In Brooklyn, Mr. Al-Samawi found two other Yemenis who had also been driven from the country by the Houthis. As exiles often do, they cooked for one another and talked about how much they missed the flavors of home. They kept circling around the idea of starting a restaurant. None of the three had any relevant background, but they hired two experienced Yemeni chefs and built a roster of dishes from all over their country.
They opened Yemenat earlier this year in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. A slide show of items from the menu flashes on two big screens at the far end of the dining room. There is lamb haneeth, baked to its melting point in a low oven, and other classic dishes that are served in most of the Yemeni restaurants of Bay Ridge and Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island and White Plains Road in the Bronx. Other things are not so easily found, like shafoot, an appetizer made by soaking a soft, spongy bread called lahoh in a pool of pea-green herbed yogurt sauce.
