The Diaspora
Tanoreen carries the kitchens of Nazareth to Brooklyn
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Times of Palestine opens The Palestinian Table this week — a standing Friday feature on the famous Palestinian restaurants of the world, from American avenues to Arab alleys, one kitchen at a time, recipes included. It begins where any honest ranking would: in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
Rawia Bishara was born in Nazareth, in the hills of the Galilee, and came to New York with her husband in 1974. For a quarter century she cooked the food of her mother's kitchen for family and neighbors — and in 1998 she opened Tanoreen, a few tables on Third Avenue, to cook it for everyone else.
From ten tables to an institution#
The restaurant spent eleven years at 77th Street before moving to its corner at 76th and Third, and the fame arrived course by course. New York's critics came to Bay Ridge and kept coming; the Michelin Guide gave Tanoreen its Bib Gourmand; her knafeh was featured on the Food Network, and the restaurant is routinely named the city's finest Middle Eastern table.
Bishara's daughter Jumana runs the room alongside her, and the family's reach has grown with the borough's appetite — Tanoreen now serves Dumbo's Time Out Market too, taking musakhan to the East River waterfront.
Her cookbook, Olives, Lemons and Za'atar, published in 2014 and still in print a decade later, put the restaurant's philosophy in writing: Palestinian home cooking, generous and unhurried, seasoned exactly the way the Galilee seasons it.
What to order — and why it matters#
The menu reads like a map of Palestine. Musakhan, the sumac-stained chicken of the Tulkarm and Jenin countryside that Palestinians call their national dish. Maqluba, the "upside-down" pot of rice, eggplant and meat flipped at the table. Her famous Brussels sprouts — a Brooklyn vegetable converted to citizenship with panko, yogurt and pomegranate, the dish critics never stop writing about. And the knafeh: warm, cheese-hearted, orange-blossomed, made to be shared.
A restaurant is the easiest embassy to visit. Tanoreen has been Palestine's in Brooklyn since 1998.
Cook it at home: musakhan#
The national dish, as Palestinian homes have always made it — our own telling of the traditional method.
- Roast a jointed chicken rubbed with olive oil, salt, allspice and a heavy hand of sumac.
- Slice four large onions and stew them slowly in a generous half-cup of olive oil until silken — twenty minutes, no color, no hurry.
- Fold two more spoonfuls of sumac through the onions, with toasted pine nuts.
- Lay taboon (or any thick flatbread) on a tray, soak it with the onion oil, pile on the onions, set the chicken on top, and return it all to a hot oven until the bread's edges crisp.
- Serve with yogurt, eat with your hands, and squeeze lemon over everything.
For her signature Brussels sprouts and the knafeh, Bishara's own measures are in Olives, Lemons and Za'atar — the recipes are hers to give, and the book gives them well.
The Palestinian Table returns next Friday. In the queue: Reem's California in the Bay Area, Fadi Kattan's Akub in London, Amman's knafeh institution Habibah, and Al Janiah in São Paulo.
