It’s summer and the weather is gorgeous, and Amman becomes alive again after the dead winter months. To celebrate the heat, here’s a list of my favorite 10 summer hangouts in Amman, with the perfect time to visit them included.

This list is not ordered by preference.

1. La Calle’s terrace, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
The end of Rainbow Street

While finding a good spot on La Calle’s summer terrace is no easy feat, it’s worth the hassle (it’s always crowded because 6:00-8:00 is also happy hour). The sunset is stunning, and the calm vibes of early evening Rainbow Street make La Calle one of my favorite summer places.
Try: Their pizza.

Total:

2. Las Tapas’ outdoor garden, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM.
Behind the Third Circle, 06-4615061.

While Las Tapas’ service is perhaps the worst in Amman, I’m always braving the crappy customer experience to enjoy their garden. I love their dark wooden furniture contrasted again the evergreen plants and the reddish tiles. My favorite part of the garden is the pink “Majnooneh tree” (no idea what the scientific name for it is), framing the doorway.

Try: Their risotto balls and three-kinds-of-pasta platter.

Total:

3. Vinaigrette’s open sushi bar, Sunday dinner, 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM. 06-560528.
Shmeisani, Al-Qasr Hotel. 06-560528.

I love Vinaigrette. The view of Amman at night through their glass walls is stunning, their customer service is excellent, and their food is one of the best in Amman. For fans of sushi, I do not think sushi can get any better in Amman (I haven’t tried Yoshi yet though, to be honest), and their 20.00JD all-you-can-eat sushi deal is definitely worth the money.

Try: Their all-you-can-eat sushi.

Total:

4. Books@Cafe, Saturday/Friday mornings and afternoons. 06-4650457.
Jabal Amman.

Books@Cafe is my favorite place in the entirety of this city. The staff are friendly, the space is awesome, the crowd is non-judgmental and eclectic, and the food is great.
I really hate how they covered their terrace, but that doesn’t make the place rock that much less.

Try: Their pizza.

Total:

(Photo by Gulf Life Magazine)
5. Tche Tche, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM.
Several locations. 06-5932020.

I actually really like Tche Tche. They have good food, logical prices, free wi-fi, and Amman’s best arageel. My only wish is that they’d have more comfortable chairs.

Try: Their salmon fillet.

Total:

6. The guys’ terrace, Saturday/Friday, 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM.
Mutran Street, Jabal Amman.

While this place isn’t open to the public, I have to have in on this list because it’s one of my favorite places in town, with some of my favorite people in the world. Great company, great conversations, and a comfortable couch.

Total:

(Photo by Gulf Life Magazine)
7. Blue Fig’s garden, Saturday, 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM.
Abdoun. 06-5928800.

Blue Fig is really cool during the morning, very laid-back and chilled out, as opposed to the vibes this place has during the evening. Their food is excellent as well.

Try: Their New Orleans Burger.

Total:

8. Canvas.
Weibdeh. 06-4632211.
I like Canvas a lot, because you can sit outside or inside and feel and enjoy the restaurant’s wonderful ambiance. Their menu isn’t very good, but the setting itself is worth the bad drinks.

Total:

(Photo by Debbini)
9. Champions. Weekdays, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM.
Marriot Hotel, Shmeisani. 06-5607607.

This is an almost unlikely addition to this list, and I find myself surprised at its addition. Champions is a good place to watch a game with my sports-obsessed Moose; the seating is comfortable, the food is excellent, and the noise level is always optimum.
 
Try: Their sharing platter.

Total:

10. Coffee and News, the sidewalk. Weekdays. 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM.
Rainbow Street.

Coffee on the sidewalks of Rainbow Street is great, especially when combined with kaek from Abu Ghosh across the street. Coffee and News is very unassuming, and I like that a lot about it.

Total:

There is hope for Jabal Amman yet, as the newest outery, dubbed “Turtle Green Tea Bar”, happily proves.

During the past few years, Rainbow Street has suffered from the marring attacks of crappy, non-nonsensical, tourist-seeking “village style” design. This design style (also affecting downtown Amman) is really, REALLY stupid, butchering the modern history of Amman and the ancient history of Philadelphia. It would work in a city like Damascus, but the vintage wood, “Bab Il Hara” visuals, and waiters wearing 2aba2eeb is complete historical vandalism for a city as young as Amman. Even Falafal Al-Quds, one of our modern landmarks, has succumbed to this hideous trend. Ahmad had predicted this marring back in 2008, so you can read his post here.

Turtle Green, on the other hand, half way between Old Times Cafe and Falafel Al-Quds, is the epitome of what Rainbow Street represents, historically speaking. Laid back and brilliantly modern, yet completely unassuming, Turtle Green is Amman’s first tea bar.  

Taste

Style

Vibes

Price

Parking

Staff

The interior of the place rocks. It is neither underdesigned nor overdesigned. Some additions are kitschy, and others are stunning. The mix is extremely comfortable — it’s the kind of place where you’d feel so comfortable sitting at for hours, and hours, whether working using their free Wi-fi connection or chatting with a group of very good friends.

The staff (mostly the owners at this point) did a great job at making me feel like this place can be home. The tea selection is not overwhelming, and I really enjoyed my cold jasmine tea.

This is my favorite new place since Las Tapas.

Final verdict: Kick ass. Totally recommended.

Total:

Location: Jabal Amman, Rainbow Street, across from the British Council
Reservations: no
Phone: no idea
Recommended Item: Jasmine Ice Tea
Average Price: 2.5 JDs

Taste

Style

Price

Parking

Staff

When Moose told me about bubble tea, I immediately was dying to try it. The way he described it was heavenly, “Frozen fruit juice and tea with gummy balls at the bottom of the cup.”

Yummm!

So when I heard through Twitter that Amman’s first bubble tea shop has opened, I dragged my mother, aunt, and Moose all the way to Sweifieh to try it out.

Before you go dream of gummy candy, let me make what I discovered today quite clear: the “gummy balls” at the bottom of the drink are actually not gummy candy at all, they’re actually cooked tapioca plants (I had no idea that there was something called tapioca before!) These balls do not interfere with the taste of the juice, and they do add a much more interesting experience to bland smoothies.

While Bilal, the owner (an extremely nice guy, by the way!), recommended one of their yogurt-mixed drinks or milkshakes, I really am not a fan of milk-based drinks, so I stuck to the fruit smoothies. We tried four flavours: mango, taro (which I discovered via Wikipedia is “Qulqas”, a food I happen to really like, which we cook as a stew), strawberry with watermelon, and passionfruit. The taro and passionfruit were a little too sweet for me, so I preferred the watermelon one.

Final verdict: If you haven’t had bubble tea, I’d definitely recommend you try it. It’s quite an interesting experience, especially if Bilal is around to tell you all about the plants used :)

Total:

Location: Sweifieh Avenue Mall, right off the Sixth Circle
Reservations: no
Phone: http://www.juicebangbang.com/index.html
Recommended Item: Watermelon and strawberry quickie
Average Price: 3 JDs

Writing an urban guide to Amman has always been on the list of things I want to do one day. In the meantime though, I’ve had the opportunity to write about my three favorite areas in Amman for Gulf Life magazine. So as to not bombard you with a gazillion words, I will publish each area separately, starting with Jabal Amman.

1 CITY, 3 NEIGHBOURHOODS

(click to enlarge)

Not the most historic of cities, and often overshadowed by its neighbours Damascus and Cairo, Amman has plenty to offer the visitor. Roba Al-Assi, a native Ammani and vocal city cheerleader, sheds light on the places she loves.

JABAL AMMAN.
It’s the most popular hill in the city, and with good reason: there’s plenty to offer in this Jordanian gem.

In any other Middle Eastern city, Jabal Amman would probably be regarded as the modern quarter. But in Amman, one of the region’s newest capitals, the Jabal is the nearest thing the city has to a historic heart. It boasts none of the colourful souqs or old pasha’s residences of places like Cairo or Damascus, and it’s easier to find an espresso than an Arabic coffee or a rooftop bar than a Mamluk mausoleum, but don’t take that to mean that it’s lacking in character.

A good place to take the pulse of the neighbourhood is along cobblestone-clad Rainbow Street – the road signs used to say Abu Bakr Al-Sideeq Street, until the residents voted to change the official name to match the one everyone calls it by, after the Rainbow Cinema.

On a corner along here is a modest bakery, easy to miss if it wasn’t for the enticing aroma of freshly baked bread that wafts out of the doorway. It’s known as Abu Ghosh  (Rainbow St, near First Circle), after the owner, who works his red-brick furnace from early morning until he closes in the late afternoon, taking raw dough from stacks of wood racks and turning it into thick, baguette-like kaak, which is baked to order only. On a battered wooden table are DIY fillings: a plastic bag of thyme, a box of cream-cheese triangles and the bakery’s speciality, grilled eggs. There is no better breakfast in Amman.

A little way down the road, peaceful Viewpoint Park  is the ideal location in which to eat your sandwich. The view takes in the downtown chaos in the valley below and the Roman Citadel on the hill opposite. If it’s chilly, you can always warm up with a hot cup of cinnamon caramella from the nearby branch of Cups & Kilos (Rainbow St), which is Amman’s most popular homegrown coffee chain.

While not everybody is interested in buying the organic herbs and hand-crafted jewellery it sells, the Wild Jordan Centre  (Othman Bin Affan St, +962 6 463 3542), designed by local star architect Ammar Khammash, is a stunning structure and definitely worth seeing. It has a basement café with terraces that offer more fine views, not to mention one of Jordan’s only organic restaurants.

The centre is the home in Amman of the Royal Society of Conservation for Nature, one of a number of worthy organisations that have headquarters locally. A short walk away, the Film House (5 Mango St, +962 6 464 2266) is home to the Royal Film Commission, which has turned an attractive 1930s villa into a hub for audio-visual arts, with regular movie screenings. The films are shown in an outdoor amphitheatre against a mountainous backdrop.

If there is one element that definitively characterises Jabal Amman, it’s the stairs. A snakes-and-ladders-like profusion of staircases connects the neighbourhood to the lower districts of Amman. There is a beautifully crumbling flight of stairs next to Wild Jordan. Don’t be concerned that it appears to lead to a private home – many do, crossing backyards, passing front doors and descending beneath washing lines, but these are public paths. The Wild Jordan stairway passes Masrah Al-Balad, an old theatre recently renovated and now used for concerts and other cultural events. At the bottom you find yourself in the busy traffic of downtown, to which the only sensible response is to flag down a taxi and ride back up to Rainbow Street again.

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Here’s a PDF with the pictures and stuff:

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Tags: Amman travel guide, Amman urban guide, city guide for Amman, traveling to Amman, Middle East, places in Amman, what to do in Amman, things to do in Amman, traveling to the Middle East, where to go in the Middle East.

Daily office conversation:

- “I’m hungry.”
- “So am I.”
- “What shall we order?”
- “Let’s order X.”
- “X is too expensive.”
- “How about Y?”
- “Y is too oily.”
- “How about Z?”
- “EWWWWW.”

And it goes on and on. Usually for an hour. I’m sure this happens often with other companies as well, so I’ve created this handy little flow-chart that will hopefully make ordering decisions much easier :)

Enjoy!

The worst thing about big football games in this city is that coffeeshops and sports bar use the opportunity to weasel your dinar’s out of you with excessive skill. Tickets that include nothing reach 25 JDs, the price of drinks (even Pepsi!) quadripples, and they turn into schmucks with reservations and stuff. You remember our experience with Milano, after which we’ve boycotted it.

To make your life a little easier in choosing where to go, I’ve decided to freely advertise the Nox Champion’s League Final (this coming Wednesday the 27th), because it’s a good deal, and because I know the people who work there and I’m pretty sure they have something entertaining up their sleeves.

For 10 JDs, you get free drinks, free food, free gifts, and of course, it wouldn’t be a football final without the quizzes and raffles. The gifts should be cool too, they include signed Man United and Barca stuff… The best part as far as I’m concerned: outdoor seating by the Dunes pool to kickstart your summer!

For more info, here’s the Facebook event group.

If you want to secure a seat, you can pick up your tickets at:
- Showtime Abdoun 588 5055/ 88
– iSystem Abdoun 582 9504
– Dunes Club Airport Street412 5400
– NEM Office University Street 516 3357/ 079 5968967

They will also be available at the door, if they aren’t sold out by that time! :)