Imagine There's No Countries (On Your Plate)
Rula Deeb and Moyin Halabi speak
of the food of 'Greater Syria,' rather
than Druze cuisine or the Galilean
kitchen.
Hummus served in the Rula restaurant in Haifa.Dan Peretz
Moyin Halabi prepares the baba ghanoush from scratch for each diner, and serves it hot. He holds the eggplant, pricks it with a fork, carefully grills it on an open fire until the skin is well scorched, and finally mixes the gold-green flesh with tehina. The result is a seductive delicacy, bursting with taste and aroma, a far cry from the cold salad we are usually served as an appetizer in local eateries. The individual preparation in what is mostly a one-man kitchen takes time.
“This is not a place for people in a hurry,” says Halabi serenely. “This kitchen has only one pair of hands working in it. Regular customers know that and are patient. If someone comes in and doesn’t have much time, I politely suggest that he eat elsewhere. Apart from that, the traditional Arab meal doesn’t have the Western division of first course, main course and so on. A dish is brought to the table when it’s ready and
everybody shares it. That is what motivated me when I designed my menu.”
Rula is the name of the restaurant that opened just a couple of months ago on Haifa’s Mount Carmel. Rula Deeb is Halabi’s partner, in life and in business. She was born in 1969 into a Christian Arab family in the northern village of Rama. Moyin Halabi, born the same year, is Druze, from the village of Daliyat el-Karmel. They met in the corridors of the philosophy department at Tel Aviv University and have been together for 16 years. Their situation as a Druze-Arab couple “is still far from acceptable” in traditional Druze society, says Deeb. “It is a very closed society. It doesn’t welcome strangers who were not born into the Druze community. Even the closest members of [Halabi’s] family found it difficult to
accept us at first.”
Deeb became active in the feminist organization Isha L’Isha (Woman to Woman), which addresses many women’s issues, and in Shutafut-Sharakah (where she currently works part time), a Jewish-Arab forum of several organizations dedicated to the advancement of equality and democratic principles in Israel.
Halabi completed his MA in the philosophy of logic as part of the interdisciplinary program of Prof. Yehuda Elkana. He initially worked as a strategy consultant (“They had me picked out for politics. I was an admirer of Amir Peretz until I came to my senses. It was terrible”), then in advertising (“That was even worse”), until he opted for his true love and began working in a kitchen.
Rula Deeb.Dan Peretz
“I’m an amateur cook. I don’t like being called anything else. I never studied cooking professionally. Everything I know I learned on my own. When I was young I was a bit problematic when it came to food. I was almost vegan. I didn’t eat meat or dairy products. When I moved to Tel Aviv, the food was so bad that I started trying to reconstruct flavors and fragrances by myself.”
Moyin Halabi.Dan Peretz
The name Halabi gives to the cuisine he explores, cooks and serves is “Shami,” an old term for Syrian. “Shami cuisine, the cuisine of Greater Syria, was common to all the inhabitants of the region until political borders were drawn in the 20th century. What they used to eat and still eat in Haifa, they eat in Damascus and Beirut. I’m really Syrian: my forebears came here 500 years ago from the region of Syria. I reject the term ‘Druze food.’ And with all due respect to [chef] Erez Komarovsky – and I have a lot of respect for him – there is no such thing as ‘Galilean cuisine.’ I’m not inventing anything, but just trying to redefine Shami cooking. Israelis know almost nothing of that rich cuisine.”
Labaneh served in the Rula restaurant in Haifa.Dan Peretz
The social media networks of the 21st century have erased artificial political borders and recreated the common region, even if it’s only virtual, of Greater Syria. “I’m a person who explores – I’m a student of philosophy, after all – and I use every source I can find, and
utilize everything I know about the social background and history of the recipes. I have a network of friends in Syria and Lebanon who are prepared to help compare the recipes and foods of different cities and regions. Today I can ask a cook in Aleppo how she makes her fata [a yogurt soup].”
Genre of broken bread
It’s early evening at Rula. Halabi is in the open kitchen; Deeb is the hostess, serving meals and creating a homey, relaxed atmosphere. We sit at the counter, opposite the
philosopher-cook, eating and talking, talking and eating. Moyin’s hummus begins the meal (the menu describes it as “Haifa hummus”), creamy and surprisingly light, with a lemony aroma, whole, hot
chickpeas, tehina and sumac. Then comes Rula’s labaneh, as lovely as the woman herself, adorned with glistening
pomegranate seeds, walnuts and tiny leaves of zaatar. The fata makdous that comes out next is made up of fried strips of pita, eggplant slices and ground veal, topped with tehina, yogurt and pine nuts. The conversation changes from an etymological analysis of the different terms for hummus that have entered the Hebrew language and Israeli culture, to a lively discussion of the transformation over time of the ancient dish now before us.
The origins of this dish, actually a whole family of dishes, lie in the Early Arab Period (638-1099): the similarity to tharid, a dish particularly enjoyed by the Prophet Muhammad, is unmistakable. But Halabi has another theory. “In the First World War, a period of severe shortage in the Arab community, the Turks conscripted any boy over the age of 18,” he says. “In the famine that followed, people began to recycle bread, one of the staples of the Middle Eastern diet. That’s how an entire genre of dishes developed. They were called fata, from the same root as the Hebrew pat lechem [a piece of bread]. The bits of dry bread were soaked in the liquid of whatever was being cooked, and that main ingredient, a vegetable or a meat, gave its name to the fata. It was eaten with a topping of yogurt or tehina. There is an eggplant fata, a chicken fata, a sheep’s-head fata, and so on.”
Halabi’s kebab is as good as his wonderful fata. The “fingers” of ground meat are made from a mixture of lamb, beef and mutton fat (most restaurants make it with beef and mutton fat alone), grilled to perfection, and served with a sprinkling of finely chopped mint leaves, lemon juice, garlic and pistachio nuts.
Rula – Levantine Restaurant, 11 Sderot Moriah, Haifa. Tel. (04) 838-3866; 052-227-3812
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