Yemen!

Pulling a randomized list of countries is risky (I didn't even know Sao Tome and Principe was a country!), but I was really excited that Yemen popped up on this one. I first tried Yemeni food at Yemeni Restaurant in Columbus and it was fantastic; I still dream about the hummus with lamb from that meal! Luckily, Cleveland has its own Yemeni restaurant, Yemen Gate, in the Little Arabia neighborhood. An enclave of stores, restaurants, and other businesses in the West Park area, Little Arabia has welcomed refugees and immigrants looking for a taste of home. I'll be exploring more of the neighborhood as I work my way through the list, but a quick drive down Lorain Avenue showed more than just Middle Eastern fare - Caribbean, Nepalese, German, a place serving tacos AND Cambodian dishes, etc. My kind of neighborhood!

Yemen Gate is hard to miss. It's just down from the historic Variety Theater and not far from the Holyland International Supermarket. 

There is plenty of seating inside the modestly decorated space and a counter to pick up the carry out orders that seemed to steadily come in while we were there. The menu has a lot of options, especially when you're hungry and want to order it all. This time I was smart and brought my boyfriend along so when I inevitably ordered too much food, I'd have someone to help me eat it. 

I decided to start with the adani tea spiced with cardamom and clove and Jason tried the limeade with mint which was frothy and light with bits of fresh mint leaves. The hardest part was deciding which entrees we wanted because everything sounded great. We settled on two traditional Yemeni dishes - saltah and fahsah. Saltah is described as fresh assorted root vegetables (I spotted potatoes, carrots, and zucchini in my bowl) combined with whipped fenugreek and lamb broth. It's served volcano-style (very hot!) in a clay bowl with traditional bread. Fahsah is a saltah-ish base plus lots and lots of shredded lamb.

Order in, time to research!

Yemen lies on the Arabian peninsula of Asia and shares borders with Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the Red and Arabian Seas. Once controlling the supply of frankincense and myrrh and dominating the trade of many other spices and aromatics of Asia, it was known to the ancient Romans as Arabia Felix or Fortunate Arabia. Did you know that coffee was first cultivated commercially in Yemen? Me either! For 200 years, Yemen was the only source of coffee, mostly distributed by camel until it began shipping from the Red Sea.

Chicken, lamb, and goat are eaten more often than beef and fish is featured heavily in the coastal regions. Yemeni cuisine is often prepared hot and spicy with the use of chili peppers, cumin, coriander seeds, tumeric, and other spices. Fenugreek, mint, and cilantro show up in many dishes as well.

Malawah is the impossibly perfect flatbread baked in a clay oven and used to sop up the delicious broths. Sahawiq, the green version is called zhug, is a salsa or pesto-like hot sauce served alongside meals. Lunch is usually the heaviest meal of the day in Yemen, so we were right on track with the giant bowls of food headed to our table. 

Okay, that's enough research! Time to eat!

They weren't joking when they said it was served volcano-style. The broth was still bubbling in the clay bowls! Jason said his mouth was ruined for several days after his last Yemeni food experience because he dove right into the boiling-hot bowls, but that is a hard lesson to learn when it smells so dang good. We dove in again, but maybe with a little more caution this time around. The national dish, saltah, is like the best vegetable stew you've had - thick chunks of potatoes, carrots, and zucchini in a flavorful broth perfect for dipping the malawah in with every bite. It's even better with a tiny spoonful of sahawig added on top. I love lamb and the fahsah here does it proud - it's melt-in-your-mouth tender and perfectly spiced. We were both jockeying for the final bite. But that bread, COME ON. It's chewy and soft with charred bits -- think naan, but 100x better. The clay oven works some serious magic here. 

If you thought that two dishes plus two enormous pieces of bread was kind of light for me, you were right. We ordered fatah with dates and honey for dessert. It  seemed bread pudding-ish -- that amazing flat bread shredded up and fried with dates and then topped with a thick, creamy yogurt and tons of honey. The serving was massive and even with two people steadily working our way through it, we couldn't finish. A second cup of adani tea was a perfect balance to this very heavy dessert. 

Two weeks and three countries down. This project is bringing me so. much. joy.

Yemen Gate
11901 Lorain Ave.
Cleveland, OH 44111
Website

Operating Hours:
MON - SUN | 11:00am - 10:00pm