“I just got Fairouz’s music playing and it drew curious Arab guests to the restaurant…” Syrian chef, Abdul Kader Saleh Zeitoun reveals the ‘insider’s trick’ to lure guests to Crowne Plaza’s restaurant Mosaic, which is hosting an Arabian food festival. A singer and food? The connection is lost on us.
He educates us on what the Lebanese singer Fairouz means to Arabs especially in Saudi, Kuwait and the Emirates, and that her music is played daily for a couple of hours by some radio stations there. “And Arabs would recognise it anywhere and they would come to check.” Chef Abdul Kader who works at Barouk, the Lebanese restaurant at Crowne Plaza Yas Island, Abu Dhabi, was in Kochi for the 10-day food festival which concludes on Sunday.
The Arab food for the average Malayali is all that is available at the shacks (with West Asia-inspired names in Arabic font) – shawarma, falafel, grilled meats accompanied by khuboos and hummus. With Abdul Kader we learn that shawarma is of Turkish origin, find that Arabs eat more of lamb meat, discovered that makhboos Emirati is a kind of biriyani, get a taste of mutabal, make acquaintance with the delicious batata harra and savour the light and refreshing tabbouleh. The chef tells us about cuisines of West Asian countries influencing each other and how Arabic sounds different in different parts of the region.
The food festival has been so planned that guests from West Asia ‘feel at home’. This tourist season has seen an unprecedented rise in the number of Arab tourists visiting Kerala. It is also a reason, Abdul Kader says, why he wasn’t able to ‘experiment’ with Arabian food. “The Arab guests find the food here too spicy so I have had to stick to the basics.” Basic or not, the food tastes different from the ‘Arabian’ food one has encountered.
The batata harra is tangy-potato cubes fried with the skin on – perfectly complemented by the eggplant dip, mutabal. The mashawi, a platter of grilled meats (akin to our kebabs) served with bright yellow makhboos, chicken wings mutaffah…it is a lot of meat in a meal. Abdul Kader’s “In Arabia you eat vegetarian if you are sick” explains it all.
Tabbouleh, a salad of parsley, tomatoes, olive oil, lemon juice and burghul (a cereal) is light and crunchy. It is too much of a chew for the first timer, but the taste grows on you three bites later. The food, surprisingly, is not greasy and the mildness initially unnerves a palate used to spice.
The mildly-sweet um ali and the soothing yet spicy kahwa wrap up the meal, it is time well spent.
The food festival is on for dinner (buffet) and concludes on August 17.
(The writer was at the fest on the invitation of the hotel.)
