THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 11
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID WILLIAMS FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
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TABLESFORTWO
Kabab Café
2506 Steinway St., Queens
The menu posted outside Kabab Café,
in Astoria’s Little Egypt, is out of date
by roughly a quarter century. Ali El
Sayed, the proprietor, chef, and sole em-
ployee, put it up shortly after opening
the restaurant, in 1989, and then willfully
forgot about it. He refuses to be confined
to a menu and believes that all true
cooking necessitates flamboyant impro-
visation. “You have a map of flavors,” he
says. “And then you dance.”
El Sayed is heavyset and looks the
part of a chef, except in that he dons a
straw fedora in place of a toque blanche.
Watching him work, banter with regu-
lars in a mix of English and Arabic, and
croon along to an Édith Piaf number
playing over the speakers is part of the
experience. “Cooking is performance,”
he likes to say. “Every day I am onstage.”
Should you arrive before the curtain, El
Sayed can usually be found across the
street, at Caffé Borbone, partaking of a
pre-show espresso with Sambuca.
It is sometimes said of small, in-
formal restaurants with affable hosts
that they call to mind the experience
of being a guest in someone’s home.
At Kabab Café, this description takes
on literal dimensions. If El Sayed sees
you on your phone, he’ll tell you, in an
almost grandmotherly tone, to “stop
working and eat.” Every male customer
is a “brother,” every woman “honey” or
“my dear.” He might absent-mindedly
leave a dishrag on your table, or help
himself to some pita bread from your
party’s communal plate. His speech is
cheerfully peppered with expletives, and
no subject of conversation is off limits:
the sunny triad of politics, religion, and
sex is ever present. When he senses that
he may have gone too far, he’ll smile
impishly and tell you to “chillax”—he
loves you and he’s on your side.
Another enigmatic sign on the restau-
rant’s exterior reads “VEGETARIAN” in
big green letters. El Sayed can supply
no intelligible explanation for why he
put it up; Kabab Café is decidedly not
vegetarian. That said, many locals do
drop in just for the standard appetizer,
a meze platter of homemade falafel,
baba ghanoush, fava beans, fried chicory,
apple, cucumber, hummus—whatever’s
on hand. His moussaka—baked eggplant
with zucchini, potato, and fresh toma-
toes—is also a draw.
With meat dishes, El Sayed cooks
“from snout to tail,” leaving nothing to
waste. What he’ll prepare on any given
night cannot be foretold, but past del-
icacies have included cow-foot stew,
whole rabbit, and the unmentionable
parts of a goat. On a recent outing, the
lamb brain—battered in egg and rice
flour, fried in grapeseed oil, and served
in a lemon sauce with grilled peaches—
was unassailable. El Sayed also has a
penchant for the exotic and will on oc-
casion procure camel meat, crocodile,
and ostrich. Spicy alpaca sausage is a
recurring motif, which he might add to
a dish on a whim, consulting only his
gastronomic imagination for permission.
It should be said that the open kitch-
enette takes up a third of the restaurant’s
space and can produce a little smoke.
El Sayed will sometimes use a torch to
singe the skin of a bird or the scales of a
fish. One of his best dishes this summer
has been the Spanish mackerel, which
he gets from a Chinese market in Elm-
hurst and seasons with Egyptian spices.
He’ll serve it either as is, sizzling in a
cast-iron skillet, or filleted into thick
chunks and swimming in a homemade
gazpacho. Another highlight is the
charred chicken, for both its density of
flavors and its presentation. On a round
plate, he’ll ladle out four rings, one inside
another: gazpacho, smoked eggplant,
mashed baked pears, and, nestled in
the center, delectably scorched boneless
chicken. The trick is not to mix it up but
to shovel from the outside in, collecting a
bit of each layer into a single bite.
The other day, a cautious man urged
his date to order something normal. “To
be normal is idiotic,” El Sayed retorted
amiably from his post. “You should not
be normal—you should be who you are.”
(Prices are subject to El Sayed ’s discretion,
with entrées around $15-$27.)
—David Kortava
