Yemen Heaven, 98 Walmgate, York YO1 9TL. Meze £7, large dishes £15-£21.95, desserts £6-£9, wines from £23
Some restaurants are just a nice place to go for dinner. Yemen Heaven in York is obviously that. You will eat well there. The black seeded flatbreads, the breadth of over-sized dinner plates, are soft and crisp. There’s a pleasing creaminess to the spice-dusted, oil-dribbled, tahini-rich hummus that comes topped with a single shiny black olive, the savoury equivalent of a cherry on top. But the restaurant is more than that. Much like Arabic Flavour in Aberystwyth, which I visited last year, it is both the story of exile and an act of memory. It is the product of one woman’s determination to maintain her family’s traditions; to free the country of her birth from a single narrative of war and hardship, however overwhelming that narrative might seem right now.
Muna Al-Maflehi was born in Taiz, a brown stone city in the highlands of southwestern Yemen, known before the current civil war for its quality coffee production and for the abundant citrus fields with which it is surrounded. When she was seven, Muna moved with her family to Saudi Arabia, where her father taught her the dishes his father had cooked for him. It was a way of keeping alive a connection to the country and culture they had left behind. In 2013, looking for a better life, she moved with her five children to live near Salzburg. There she started her first food-delivery business before, in 2017, following close relatives to York.
The plan was always to open a restaurant, but it’s never easy; harder still for those who are newly arrived. It began with a couple of well-received pop-ups in the city from 2019 onwards, but like so many projects it was delayed by Covid. Eventually, they found an old pub, the Spread Eagle on Walmgate, in need of custodians and love. The wood-panelling and parquet is still there, and so is the bar, though beaten copper teapots now stand upon it. Otherwise, the space has been carefully papered and polished, and rubber plants strategically placed. According to the blackboard on the pavement by the front door, there is now a “secret Mediterranean garden” for smoking shisha out back.
Shortly before they were due to open, at the end of 2021, the newly decorated restaurant was broken into and ripped apart by vandals who splattered the walls with paint. “It was like a bomb had just hit it,” Muna told the York Press at the time, despairingly. “It was like being in the war in Yemen. I couldn’t believe that this had happened in the UK.” But the community wanted the restaurant. A crowdfunder was launched. More than £21,000 was raised. Yemen Heaven opened and it remains very much a family affair. It was her daughter Zay who wrote me an email spun through with gentle pride about her mother’s achievements. It was her son Moe who served us, guiding us through the menu to the Yemeni specialities. Because there is a lot here that will look familiar: hummus and baba ganoush, fattoush, tabbouleh and falafel, a quintet of those Middle Eastern bangers. Try them by all means. But as ever, it makes more sense to order the things you don’t recognise.
To go with the oven-hot flat bread, we get a bowl of bisbas, a sharp vinegary dip of blended tomatoes, coriander and garlic with an unapologetic chilli heat that comes in a few moments after you’ve nodded appreciatively at the freshness and vibrancy of the rest of it. Try the spicy shafoot which, by comparison, isn’t very. It’s a salad of cucumber and finely sliced radish, the green of a woodland clearing in spring, mixed in with pieces of crustless wholemeal bread that have soaked up the spiced mint yoghurt dressing. Pomegranate seeds and a sprinkle of sumac shine out from amid the additional layers of rocket and baby chard.
It is very hard not to like Yemen Heaven; just the idea of it, the very bones of it. The temptation with such a place is to hype it as some gastronomic temple, where a kind of kitchen alchemy turns humble ingredients into something highborn. There is indeed a form of alchemy at play here, but it is not that. It is more about comfort and care; a feeling of being properly looked after with cooking that draws on the domestic. Chicken mandi is an exotic name for something very simple. It’s a quarter piece of chicken on the bone with a timbale of rice. That long grain has the buttery separation familiar from the region. But the wonder is the chicken that looks roasted, but instead has been slow-cooked, so that it’s now falling apart. Usually, a bird like this is cotton-wool dry and cloying; this is anything but and the aromatics have penetrated every fibre. It is just a plate of chicken and rice, but it is the best chicken and rice.
There is something similar at play with the fah’sa, which is a lamb stew. There is nothing else to it other than shredded lamb and a deep, generous broth, fragrant with fenugreek. It is delivered to the table in a Yemeni stone pot, which is so hot that the broth is boiling fiercely on arrival. Think of it as the floor show. It tastes as you hope every meaty broth will, but too often doesn’t. It tastes of long cooking; of the lamb giving its all to the liquor in which it swims. It is the kind of dish that you know will improve a day, from bad to good, or from good to better.
There is a short wine list, which is three versions of “Would you like red or white?”, all priced in the mid-20s and then, at £55, a bottle of Lebanon’s Chateau Musar described as “Moe’s Wine Pick”. He’s got taste, that boy. Desserts are for those who like their sweet things very sweet indeed. Um Ali (or “Ali’s mother”) is a creamy pudding of coconut and nuts, topped with the green of pistachio and the pink of dried rose petals. Areeka is a darker, spiced bread pudding mashed together with dates and sesame oil. They are the light and dark versions of each other, and are both served so hot we have to sit and observe them for a while before digging in. At the end, we are brought glass beakers of sweet, milky Yemeni tea, heavy with black cardamom. It is very cold out there in York tonight, but like everything else at Yemen Heaven, the tea will see us right.
News bites
Rejoice! The long wait is over. After two decades, the motorway services operator Welcome Break is opening a new outpost. Welcome Break Rotherham, which has created 230 jobs, is located at junction 33 of the M1 and includes concessions from Pret a Manger, Burger King, KFC and Chopstix. And all of this inside a site which has been designed to look like a Yorkshire village. They spoil us, they really do (welcomebreak.co.uk).
The Caribbean-inspired restaurant brand Turtle Bay has announced it is going upmarket with an ‘elevated dining concept’ boasting a menu of ‘refined’ dishes drawing on the culture of the islands alongside ‘warm and welcoming venue design’, all of which honours ‘the roots of being a joyful and carefree place to connect with people’. The new Turtle Bay is being trialled at a branch in Chelmsford, which is currently shut until March while it undergoes an ‘inspired transformation that will see the restaurant elevated entirely from its current standing’. And so on (turtlebay.co.uk).
Husband and wife team Luke and Stacey Sherwood French have finally opened the much-delayed new version of their umlaut-rich Sheffield restaurant JÖRO. The original was located in a shipping container on Kelham Island; this is very much a bricks and mortar affair at the city’s Oughtibridge Paper Mill development. It will serve both an express £45 tasting menu and much longer versions priced at £125. There are seven rooms up above as well as space for SHÖP by JÖRO, selling various deli products and store cupboard staples – although there is no sign of the word ‘grocerant’ to describe this part of the business, first floated when the move was announced in 2022 (jororestaurant.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Instagram @jayrayner1
