almonds – Around the World in 196 Plates

Location: 2340 Council Ring Road #107, Mississauga
Website: https://www.facebook.com/Almonasabah/

I’ve been on quite a roll with Middle Eastern restaurants — so far I’ve checked out Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon, and they’ve all been seriously tasty. And now here’s Yemen to continue that streak.

Alonasabah’s menu is laser-focused — they have a handful of appetizers and desserts, but for the most part there’s only one dish on the menu. If you want something other than mandi? Go somewhere else, that’s all they’ve got here.

Mandi is a deceptively simple dish: it’s just rice and meat (with the choice between chicken and lamb). It’s topped with almonds, raisins, and fried onions.

It’s so good.

The rice is fragrant, richly spiced and deeply flavourful; it’s delicious enough that I’d happily eat a big bowl of it just on its own.

I tried both the chicken and lamb, and both types of meat were super tender and packed with flavour. They’ve obviously been cooked for a very long time at a very low temperature; the chicken was so incredibly tender that the cartilage had completely broken down, essentially turning into cartilage butter.

The rice and the meat are both super tasty, but it’s the toppings that help put this dish over the top. The almonds add some nuttiness and crunch, and even the raisins work surprisingly well. I’m generally not a fan of raisins in any context, so I was shocked by how much I enjoyed them here. Unlike qabuli palau, the somewhat similar dish I tried from Afghanistan, the raisins go really well with everything else. They add subtle pops of sweetness that compliment the dish perfectly and never overwhelm.

As for the onions, they were dark and intense, with a flavour somewhere between caramelized and fried. They were sweet, but with an edge — almost bordering on burnt but never crossing that line.

It seems kind of odd at first that this place only really serves the one dish, but if you do something this well? Why the hell should you waste your time doing anything else?

Location: 75 Dundas Street West, Mississauga
Website: http://reyan.ca/

I think I could make the argument that lamb is the most underrated food out there. Yes, not just most underrated meat, but most underrated food (here in North America at least. Many other countries quite sensibly eat a lot of lamb, because it’s delicious). Prepared well, it’s super tender, and jam-packed with enough flavour to put even a really good-quality piece of beef to shame. What’s not to love?

I guess Syria is one of those sensible, lamb-loving countries, and if this dish is anything to go by, they’re eating pretty well. They’re also going through some not-so-great times right now, but that falls way outside of the purview of this blog, so… lamb.

I actually discovered this place thanks to an article in the Toronto Star, which described the Lamb and Rice as follows: “The fat is so soft you could spread it on toast for breakfast. The meat and rice are perfumed with the spices, none of them competing with the intensity of the flesh.”

It’s really good. The article nails it; it’s perfectly spiced, but the star of the show is clearly that tender, immensely flavourful lamb. A knife is provided, but the meat is so perfectly tender that it’s barely even necessary.

The rice is cooked with the lamb stock, which infuses it with so much great flavour. The slivered almonds on top add crunch, and the small plate of very rich plain yogurt helps to cut through the richness. It’s a fairly no-frills dish, but man, it’s so good. In the case that the simplest dishes are often the best, this would be exhibit A.

Tag: almonds

Country 045 – Yemen (Almonasabah)

Country 033 – Syria (Reyan)