The other day we had lunch at Azkadenya, an Eat restaurant that describes itself as “a modern/retro Arabic restaurant that serves the traditional dishes of the good old days but with the modern day twist.”

Given its location on Mecca Street, I automatically assumed that Azkadenya will be as bland and characterless as every other place in the area. You know, an overpriced, cookie cutter, “upscale” junk food-serving “restaurant” with uncomfortable chairs, disastrous service, and horrible acoustics.

But I was so pleasantly surprised when I walked into the restaurant. If Azkadenya has anything going for it at all, it’s a WHOLE lot of soul.

As a far as personal taste is concerned, I am not a fan of the Rana Salam-style “Arab pop art” theme. It’s been overdone, though not in Amman. But it isn’t the theme that blew me away. Reiterating Basem Aggad, I have yet to see a consumer experience in town that is as integrated as that of Azkadenya.

Everything fits perfectly, the place is a mix of rough and delicate, from the exposed concrete ceilings to the decorative mashrabeyeh-like boxes that cover the ventilation shafts. The cutlery is beautifully designed to include Arabic sayings, and the place mats are vintage Arab ads printed on cheap newspaper paper. Even the sugar sachets are designed, and I was taken by such happy surprise when my plate told me “Sahtein o afyeh” after I finished my food.

Check out their napkins:

And the waiters’ outfits:

The food, you ask. Yes, I have to admit that I was so smitten by their attention to detail when it came to branding that I almost didn’t care about the food. Yet, my experience was excellent with the food too.

We were only four, so we didn’t order much; cheese man2ousheh, sayadeyeh (fish and rice), seneyet zahra bi theeneh (cauliflower in tahini), and hendbeh (some plant). The seneyet zahra was to die for, probably best I ever had. The sayadeyeh was also excellent, definitely something I might crave soon. The hendbeh, unfortunately, wasn’t edible, and the cheese man2ousheh was slightly bland.

The prices are high, given the portions. The service was quick and efficient.

Overall, Azkadenya is a fantastic addition to Eat’s portfolio. I am usually not a huge fan of Eat Restaurant Group. Their Italian restaurants (Casereccio and Bruschetta) are overpriced and average tasting. Their fastfood options (Shawermama and Urban Grill) are bland. Their “shisha” place, Lemon, is cliche in that horrible Ammani way that makes me want to gag. For the most part, they have absolutely no character.

Yet, credit has to be given where credit is due; the restaurant group has amazing attention to detail, the food quality (taste aside) is always superb, and they’re unbelievably professional.

I do hope that they attempt to carry over some of Azkadenya’s charm to their other eateries.

You can reach Azkadenya at (06) 554-9391.

Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? by English artist Richard Hamilton, 1956

22-11-2011 – Beirut

It’s been half a dozen times or so that I’ve set foot in Beirut since my first visit in 2006.

It has always been Hamra, the university soul of the Western part of the capital, with the faux-Bohemian street dwellers in their rebellious garb lounging the sidewalks.

Oh, Beirut, the rebel. This city is rebellious in every sense. It’s rebellious in its politics, it’s rebellious in its peace. It’s rebellious in its openness, it’s rebellious in its fundamentalism. Nothing seems to matter. Everything seems to matter.

I walk into my four-star hotel, and request a smoking room, like I usually do. The receptionist, a Palestinian with a Lebanese watheeqa called Mohammad — as I discovered from a 15 minute conversations with him about the advantages of online recruitment — laughed at me. “Smokers are welcome anywhere here in Beirut! The rooms are all yours!” he said.

I smiled. I’m not used to being welcomed much as a smoker these days, especially since I recently came back from the non-smoking capital of the Arab world, Dubai.

Mohammad is both entertaining and friendly as he checks me into the charming Mayflower Hotel. The hotel is an old one, having first opened its rooms to travelers in 1957. It has the beautiful charm of a vintage picture book; the wooden detailing, the warm marble floors, the outdated furniture that reminds me of the love I feel when I walk into my grandmother’s house.

Behind Mohammad on the large wall of the reception area is a giant tapestry of keys on over sized keychains that resemble mills from a distance. As he checks me in, I get excited abot the prospect of using a room with a key (I only had that experience once in Damascus as a teenager), but my excitement is shut down when Mohammad hands me a plastic card. Obviously, the keys are there for display, a remnant from a past when all doors had to be opened with a metal instrument that was used to manually operate a lock.

It matters not, though, because the ancient lifts more than make up for the plastic. There’s an old copper ashtray on a stand in the corner, and I feel like I’ve taken a time machine to the days when elevators had to opened like a room, and when smoking in a confined space of 1 by 2 meters was a perfectly normal thing to do. The typography on the control panel is brilliant, and I stare at the round buttons with the floor numbers with amusement.

Ah, the charm of the old!

My room itself is as gorgeous as the experience so far. The OCD in me immediately starts inspecting sheets, furniture, and towels for stains, but I found none. The rooms had been rennovated recently, as you could tell from the wall closet and television, but the wicker furniture is really old. The faded tungsten lights cloak everything with sepia undertones. There’s a huge balcony with two white plastic chairs propped in the corner, where I’m currently sitting and scribbling my thoughts while sipping from an Almaza can and smoking a cigarette.

I’m so in love with the hotel room that I get caught in the emotion of it all.

Beirut. Even the world is melodic, I think to myself, although I am not hopelessly in love with this city. Like a true Ammani, I am tempted by its crazy charm, but I can’t handle the craziness at large doses.

I smile to myself in joyous euphoria as I sit outside at 11:00 o’clock on a balcony overlooking Hamra. I love this city, with all its craziness.

There’s something fresh about the air. It’s warm, in comparison to hilly Amman. The noise pollution is welcomed, as I know that I don’t have to deal with it every day. I’m scribbling furiously on cheaply printed stationary with gold embossing and a Bic pen.

I could sit here for hours.

Life is sometimes about these little timeouts. There little moments where you really have nothing but ink — look, ma, no wi-fi! A few times a year, even a digital junkie like myself needs to spend the night sitting alone on a cheap, white, plastic chair, drinking Almaza and breathing the sea-scented air of Beirut to truly grasp the joy of living.

- End -

It’s official, I declare it to the world: Turtle Green is my favorite place in Amman.

The people who work there are awesome, their drinks are delicious, and the seats are amazingly comfortable. You can sit there all day working, reading, or just hanging out. Depending on your mood, you can choose to either disconnect yourself from your surroundings by taking a corner seat, or be a social animal by engaging in random conversations with strangers. There’s absolutely no way that you wouldn’t see less than five different friends on any given day.

Somehow, and I can’t place my finger on exactly how, Turtle Green manages to capture the most beautiful essence of Amman. It’s young. The furniture is worn, sturdy, and practical. The artwork is misplaced and random. The selection of drinks ranges from the utterly cliche to the deliciously different. Everything seems temporary, yet permanent. The owners are always hanging around, sans argileh and backgammon sets. The sharp corners are patched with leather, the signage is cardboard, and the tissues are placed in makeshift shelves. The regulars start becoming fixtures in your life, your 7ara comrades, though you might not know their names.

Turtle Green represents all that is beautiful about Amman.

During Ramadan, I spent a minimum of three hours on a (practically) daily basis lazing around on their couch. It felt like home. Alas though, as I am mostly boycotting Rainbow Street, I don’t hang around Turtle Green as much as I’d like to these days.

For the love of God, someone give some love to Weibdeh.

One of the most annoying things about working from 9:00 to 6:00 is trying to figure out what the hell to order for lunch. There aren’t many options that are easy on your wallet, healthy enough to eat often, and yummy at the same time.

Fortunately though, there’s a new place that ticks off all three of those things. 3asrooneyeh is a ka’ek place near the Shamali Gate of Jordan University. They have a large menu, and their ka’ek are the whole-wheat Lebanese style, as opposed to the one we use in Jordan.

You can thank me later :)

Here is their menu:

They deliver, you can call them at 06-535-42-49

عصرونيه عمان

Its been five long years since the first JARA summer (you can read about my thoughts on JARA back in 2005 here).

A five long years of change for Amman, a city that is creeping towards the early years of adolescence, reaching that stage of messy self-discovery, of complex identity crises and moral conflicts.

Jabal Amman, with its bourgeoisie history and current bohemian middle class is sitting at the core of the city’s shift from child to teenager. Amusingly enough, it’s not Jabal Amman’s first time serving this role; it had played a similar one in the early 70s, but somehow saw some stunted growth that has tethered the area till recent years.

Yesterday was JARA’s first Friday for the summer of 2010. I parked my car outside the guys’ place up by the first circle and walked with them the length of Rainbow Street down to Fawzi Maalouf Street, the tiny cul-de-sac that has housed JARA Market for the past five years.

The walk is beautiful, aside from the crappy village style tourist attractions like Kan Zaman and Cave I-don’t-know-what Cafe. There’s Coffee and News, its casual cool clientele sipping coffee and smoking their cigarettes without Amman’s dress-to-impress mentality. Turtle Green a few meters down the road is filled with a younger audience with their laptops shining brightly across their faces. Next to the always crowded Falafel Al-Quds is Shawermize It, a newly opened shawerma restaurant with bright green typography (that I haven’t tried yet). Gerard’s, Amman’s favorite ice-cream store, has recently opened its Rainbow address, in the same vicinity as La Calle, Cups and Kilos, and R’N'B.

Batata, the little store that has been selling nothing more than french fries for the past 15 years is my earliest memory of the street, and the memory is of a dark and empty alley, with absolutely no soul. I remember being so surprised that such a delicious place existed in that part of town, which I had never been to before (I was maybe 9). Speaking of childhood memories, my heart always aches when I pass by the huge and terribly abandoned Abu AlDahab Center, but that is a different story for a different day.

Rainbow Street is alive, and with life comes people, sounds, public interactions. With life comes hijababes, teenage metal-heads in black, families of five, older Ammani women, younger Ammani men, tourists, weird characters that are totally out of place. That’s the beauty of street life. 

It is fit to point out that JARA was opened by a great and unbelievably crowded gig by what is indisputably Jordan’s best band, Rum Tareq Al-Nasser. It also took us an hour at 11:00 PM to get to Shmeisani, which is a five minute ride on a normal day. I wasn’t even parked near Rainbow, I was parked on Manilla Road.

I really hope that the municipality closes off Rainbow Street to cars on Friday nights. Let’s make it a pedestrian street.

Summer is here.

Other Rainbow Street Posts:

My Top 10 Summer Hangouts for 2010
Urban Review: Turtle Green Tea Bar
Urban Guide to Amman: Jabal Amman
All the colors of the Rainbow
Are You Rainbow Material?
The Six Crowds You Meet in Heaven
The Dull Colors of the Rainbow
The Blouzaat Store: إنتاج شركة بلوزات للجرائم الغذائية
Through valleys and mountains
The best breakfast in town…

It’s hard to review a place that’s really about the company, so here’s a little experiment. I live-blogged around 45 minutes of conversation at the guys’ place…

This review was written a couple of weeks ago.

Taste

Style

Vibes

Parking

Staff

Italian Football:
M: “Inter Milan has only one Italian player, and he’s not even Italian, he’s black.”
Margharita: “Shut up! I don’t like this new habit of always picking on Italian football. I’m staying here for the World Cup, and I don’t like you guys anymore, you keep bitching about us Italians! I’m not going to hang out with you, I’m going to start hanging out with Italians!”
M: “Italians ruined the game!”
Philipp: “Yeah, they’re always reminiscing. Roberto Bajio was blah blah. COME ON.”
M: “Oh screw it, in 1982 they dedicated the World Cup to the PLO and that’s all that matters.”

Hitler Spoofs on YouTube:
M: “Did you know that the Hitler spoofs are being taken off YouTube?”
Philipp: “It’s so stupid because the producer wants them out. It’s the best viral marketing for the movie ever, no one else would have watched it otherwise.”
Hammoudeh: “Actually Zeid watched it.”
M: “They did it for so many things… iPad, Egypt vs. Algeria…”
Ibra: “Comic Sans.”
M: “Arab Net!”
Margharita: “Because it’s humanizing Hitler?”
Philipp: “No, because of some copyright issues.”

Damn German Products:
Roba: “This German browser is the best way to learn German, Phil. But now it’s not doing anything.”
Philipp: “What are you trying to do?”
Roba: “Upload a picture, and it’s not uploading.”
Philipp: “What do you keep pressing?”
Roba: “Bruchnen, it’s in the same place where Upload should be in the English interface. I’ve been pressing for the past five minutes.”
Philipp: “That’s because it means ‘Cancel’.”
Roba: “Oops.”

Guns:
M: “Is it true that you can’t buy waterguns in Germany?”
Philipp:  “No, that’s so stupid. Who told you that?”
M: “Hammoudeh.”
Hammoudeh: “No, I didn’t say that!!!”
M: “You did!”

Conversation About Religion:
Roba:  “Guys stop it, I don’t like this conversation, cause I can’t blog it.”

Conversation About Homosexuality:
Laden.
Roba:  “Guys, you’re doing it again.”
Margharita: “But these things are all we talk about.”
Roba:  “But they’re not blogging stuff.”
Philipp: “Maybe you should have a logged in version for your blog.”

The iPad:
M: “Eish 7abeebti?”
Roba:  “I’m waiting for something interesting to be said.”
Ibra: “THE IPAD! Today, we touched an iPad.”
Hammoudeh: “What? Here in Jordan?”
Ibra: “Yeah, it’s pretty cool.”
Hammoudeh: “Mac’s suck.”
Margharita: “Don’t say that Hammoudeh, you might get kicked out.”
Ibra: “Actually, I’m starting to question my stance on Apple, because of this whole HTML5 shit. I like Flash. Steve Jobs is being an ass.” Blabs about very technical shit for five minutes.
Ibra: “I mean flash is an era, they can’t do that.”
Zeid: “YouTube!”
Ibra: “YouTube is actually now using HTML5.”
Hammoudeh: “I want an iPad.”
Ibra: “But the response was really bad today, there was a delay with the touch.”
M: “Yeah, I hate it, they’re like the new Microsoft. We don’t like you anymore, so we’re going to screw you over.”
Hammoudeh: “Now, they’re doing that with Google too because they’re entering the phone market.”
Philipp: “Although G1 came way before iPhone.”
Zeid: “The iMate?”
Hammoudeh: “Dude, that’s Microsoft.”
More technical blabber.
Margharita:  “Why do you guys know all these things?”
M: “Paris Hilton was huge on the SideKick.”
Margharita:  “Is text messaging still in?”
M: “It has an aggegator on its mainpage for all the Social Media sites, that’s why.”
Philipp: “But all the Android phones had that.”
Roba: “Phil, I’m so proud of you, you’re liking Google.”
Ibra: “Did you guys see the guy who lost his iPhone in the bar?”
Philipp: “A GERMAN BAR.”
M: “Gizmodo shalu amalo, shala7u il iPhone.”

Conversation on 3D TV that I’m not going to bore you with
Hammoudeh: “You don’t have HDTV in Italy?”
Philipp: “Dude, are you in Jordan?”
Hammoudeh:“Screw you they’ve had HDTV in Japan for 20 years!”

Jordanian Vodka:
Hammoudeh: “There is vodka without a smell.”
M: “Yeah, a Jordanian invention. JORDANIANS invented SMELLLESS VODKA! Yeah, right.”
Zeid: “Puke and go.”
Philipp: “It’s just brilliant marketing.”
M: “It’s an alcoholic’s stunt. YOU CAN’T CREATE ALCOHOL WITHOUT A SMELL.”
Hammoudeh: “It’s a Seinfeld episode.”
M: “Oh, God, that doesn’t make sense.”

Intermission:
M: “What are you writing about this conversation?”
I read it.
M: “OH GOD YOU’RE MAKING STUFF UP.”
Philipp: “Yeah, you should stop this!”

Zeid: “Ka eni kteer joo3an.”
Zeid has been eating all night, which is why there isn’t many things coming from his mouth.

National Anthem:
M: “Oh, wow, so cool, you guys live so close to the flag. I feel so Jordanian.”
Margharita:  “Yeah, we even wake up every day to the National Anthem thanks to AlKulyeh El-Elmeyeh Il Aslameyeh.”
M: “Do they play Jeishana after the National Anthem?”
Hammoudeh: “Whatever happened to Mawtini after the National Anthem?”
Margharita:  “They used to do that, but now they only do the National Anthem.”
M: “We had a really nice anthem at school. Wataneyan Orthodoxy… ‘I’m a National Orthodox. I’m for my country, I am proud. 3areenan lil Komah’”
Hammoudeh: “Shu Komah?”
M: “Ma ba3ref. What’s the Italian national anthem?”
Margharita:  “We never sing it.” (but she sings it anyway)
M: “The American one is so bad. It’s so hard to sing. You have to have like a nice voice and shit. I always thought God Bless America was the national anthem.”

Total: