14 Formosa Street, London W9 (020 7286 6386). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £90
Amoul’s Hideaway is very obviously a restaurant. There are tables and chairs and a list of dishes for diners to choose from. A central communal table is surrounded by smaller ones, both inside and out, all tablecloth-free, and as dusk falls on a summer’s evening candles gutter and flare in glass holders. But it is also something else. It is an act of memory. It is the way one Lebanese woman, who settled in London with her English husband more than a quarter of a century ago, has chosen not to let the very essence of who she is fade away.
Here, in this corner of London’s Little Venice, is a place that is forever the Lebanese kitchen, and very much of the domestic variety rather than the commercial. At many of the other Lebanese restaurants I have visited, the menu is built around the charcoal grill – whatever else you eat, smoky flamed meats will be at the heart. But the grill is not an item for the home kitchen and this is very much the food of the latter. If Amoul has a charcoal grill downstairs, she chooses not to use it. Instead, this is food of the oven and the stove top. Reflecting the influence of France on Lebanon’s traditions, she makes croissants from scratch for her weekend breakfasts and endless flaky Lebanese pastries; she bakes manoushi – flatbreads topped with a mix of thyme, sesame seeds and the purple citric kick of sumac – and churns her own ice creams.
Those of us who have mislaid our own mothers could be forgiven for wondering whether she might be up for filling the vacancy, even if only at the table. Certainly she does not keep herself to the kitchen. Amoul’s, which first opened in 2003, is her place – she deals only in first names – and so she comes and goes from the dining room, consulting with her young front-of-house staff on orders taken and questions raised. She opens for dinner only from Tuesday to Friday, for breakfast, lunch and dinner on Saturday and for brunch on Sunday. Hers is a civilised life.
I assemble my own meal from the menu of mezze and mains and ask her if we have missed any greatest hits. She considers my list. Even bound beneath the dull snowfall of chef’s whites, her hair tucked beneath her cap, she is a strikingly elegant woman. In a reversal of the usual way of things, I find myself craving her approval. Have I chosen well? She gives a light nod and suggests one extra dish.
Jonathan Gold, the terrific restaurant critic of the Los Angeles Times, once told me I would find better traditional Korean restaurants in LA than I would in Seoul. In California, he said, the expatriate Koreans were busy actively remembering. Back home they were looking forward. It is one of the glorious features of a city like London, and of our enthusiastic tradition of welcoming immigrants (for which my family is as grateful as so many others) that there are so many people remembering, and doing so through food. This, Amoul says, is her mother’s and her grandmother’s food. These are her memories, refreshed each day at the stove.
From the list of pastries we have thumb-length cheese borak, the flaky golden deep-fried shells giving way to a salt-sour filling of milk only recently introduced to its solid form. Here, lamb kibbeh are baked flaky pastries with the tidiest of pleated edges that let out sweet, meaty puffs as you tear them away. There is a rich, textured hummus with toasted pine nuts and dark, caramelised nuggets of salty lamb. The classic baba ghanouj (their spelling), the beaten aubergine whipped with tahini and lemon, carries with it a deep smokiness, as though the very flames that rendered the vegetables have become a part of it. In a dish of aubergine fattah, the vegetables remain whole (just about), despite long roasting, beneath a downpour of garlicky yogurt, all topped with squares of crisp flatbread deep-fried to the colour of copper coins.
Hindbeh is wild chicory, lightly bitter and as dark green as an English sea on a winter’s day, made soothing by the application of heaps of sweet, caramelised onions. The earthiest plateful is a dish of chicken livers sautéed in a black spiced sauce of pomegranate molasses and lemon. It needs something to calm it all down and that comes in the shape of Amoul’s flatbread, still warm from the oven.
For mains there are two chicken dishes. A beauty contest is won by boneless roasted chicken laid over long-cooked rice with almonds, simmered in stock until all but dry and sticky; another of grilled chicken with roast potatoes and a pile of tabbouleh, the finely diced parsley sending it freshly on its way, is only just a runner-up. But the star is the dish Amoul insisted we have. Kibbeh bissanyeh is the mothership of meat loafs – the meat loaf all other meat loafs hope to be one day, if they pass the right exams. Finely minced and lightly spiced lamb is mixed with heaps of marjoram, caramelised onions and pine nuts and then baked until its browned, crisped surface makes it look like a dark Christmas sponge cake. It is rich and intense. On the side is a cucumber and yogurt salad, there to soften the intensity – but I don’t want any of this softened. We end up chasing the last crumbs around the plate.
The desserts are the most homely element: there’s a warm chocolate cake with a coal-black sauce, and a caramelised apple cake, both the sort of thing a fretful maiden aunt would give you on a cold winter’s day to make sure the elements didn’t take you down. A pomegranate sorbet, served in an ornate gilt-rimmed glass, is an enthusiastic hit of sour and sweet and fruit. It is the pleasingly intense pink of a My Little Pony character. We finish with an eggless ice cream, with the crunch of ground pistachios and the plastic spring of mastic, a sudden textural memory for anyone who has ever walked a corniche on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, cornet in hand.
The price above is for a full meal, but with small dishes at around £7 and mains double that, you could eat for far less. Is it a grand gastronomic experience? Of course not. It’s nowhere near that tiresome. It is a snapshot of someone else’s life, delivered one delicate plateful at a time.
Jay’s news bites
■ While the heft of the charcoal grill and smoker feature heavily in the preparation of meat at Josh Katz’s glorious Hackney restaurant Berber & Q, Amoul would recognise much else in the way vegetables are treated here. Dishes like the whole roasted cauliflower ‘shawarma’ with pomegranate seeds, or the blackened aubergine with garlicky yogurt come straight out of a familiar domestic Levantine playbook (berberandq.com).
■ How things are connected: the price of black pepper has hit an all-time high despite increases in production, and that increase is being fuelled by a massive rise in meat consumption in Asia. In 2006 pepper traded internationally at $1,500 a ton. Now it’s at around $12,000 a ton.
■ Restaurant Sat Bains in Nottingham is moving over to a Wednesday-to-Saturday operation from November. The reason: the current restaurant boom has created a shortage of skilled cooks, and they want to appear as attractive to the right employees as possible. As Bains says: “We need incentives to attract the workforce” (restaurantsatbains.com).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
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