Turkish, Israeli chefs bring Ottoman-inspired cuisine to downtown Haifa
Dozens of Arab and Jewish chefs took part in A-Sham Arab Food Festival in Haifa this year, to prepare Turkish and Ottoman-inspired dishes at tens of restaurants in the city.
HAIFA- Salah Kordi’s lahmacun briefly transported me back to Istanbul’s Besiktas neighborhood and the restaurant below the apartment where I used to buy Turkish meat pizzas to go. But while the spices and crisp flatbread were familiar, Kordi substituted ground beef with amberjack caught off the coast of his hometown of Jaffa.
Kordi, a chef at Al-Ashi restaurant in Jaffa, was one of dozens of Arab and Jewish chefs who descended Dec. 6-7 on Haifa’s downtown for the fourth annual A-Sham Arab Food Festival. This year’s festival featured Turkish and Ottoman-inspired dishes at 32 different restaurants and venues in the revitalized area around the city’s port.
“Listen, the Ottomans were here 400 years,” Kordi told Al-Monitor. “My grandmother cooked this food: stuffed vegetables, stuffed grape leaves, shishbarak, kishek, lahma ba’ajin, kubbeh” — all traditional Palestinian dishes with influences from around the former Ottoman Empire.
Lahma ba’ajin is the Arabic cognate of the Turkish lahmacun, a flatbread topped with ground meat, herbs and spices. Kordi’s dish pays homage to the popular Turkish street food but gives it a Palestinian twist by incorporating onions and sumac and paper-thin Druze pita instead of thicker dough.
