THE NEW YORK TIMES, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2020 N D7A NEW RESTAURANTshowed up in October
on Third Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn,
announcing its arrival right in the sidewalk,
where a tracery of Arabic script meaning
“end the occupation” and a peace sign are
imprinted in concrete. Above the street wall
— a grid of windows that slides open in good
weather — the restaurant’s mission is writ-
ten in swooshes of red, green and black
spray paint: “Shawarma. Falafel. Palestin-
ian Street Food.”
Ayat is all that and more. Orders to stay
or to go are taken at the end of a long glass
counter, behind which are displayed trays of
whipped hummus, tightly rolled grape
leaves, muhammara the consistency of
peanut butter from the health food store,
taboulleh minced so finely it might have
been cut with scalpels, and a dozen other
mezze and salads.
In the background are two slowly turning
towers of meat, one chicken and the other
beef, getting darker and more distractingly
aromatic until an order comes in, and the
dark patches are clipped off and drop like
wool shorn from a sheep.
All in all, it is a standard falafel-and-
shawarma setup except for one thing, the
steel dome next to the front window that
looks like a big upside-down wok. Its hot,
convex surface is a griddle that cooks a
crepe-thin flatbread that is essential to
many Palestinian dishes, Palestinian meals
and this exceptional Palestinian restaurant.
The griddle is known as a saj. At Ayat, the
bread is also called saj, although it goes by
other names as well, like markouk.
Saj is the bread that you will be given for
swishing around in roughly pounded baba
ghanouj. Saj swaddles your sandwich of
grilled beef kebab.
And saj makes the first layer of Ayat’s
mansaf, where it is sprinkled with cinna-
mon and cardamom and spread across the
bottom of a glazed red-clay dish under an
inch or so of yellow rice. Embedded in this
starch-on-starch foundation are several
great hunks of lamb stewed with a white
powder shaved from rock-hard stones of
dried yogurt called jameed. The stew
produces very tender meat, along with an
intense emulsion of rendered fat, lamb
juices and reconstituted yogurt that is
served in a separate bowl. This emulsion is
a bit like hot lamb mayonnaise, intoxicating
in its way but rich enough to make you
grateful for the crunch provided by the
toasted almond slivers that have been
freely distributed over the mansaf’s sur-
face.
A taller, more cushiony wheel of bread,
this one baked in an oven, serves as an ed-
ible plate in Ayat’s version of mussakhan, a
signature of West Bank and Jordanian
cooking. The bread, called taboon, is cov-
ered with browned onions, pine nuts and
roasted chicken dusted with ground sumac;
it sits there, soaking up juices from the
chicken and the onions, until you eat it.
Bread is key to all good fattoush but espe-
cially to Ayat’s, made with shards of pita
that are translucently thin, crisp as potato
chips and virtually purple with ground su-
mac. The sumac’s tartness is picked up and
amplified by the lemon-juice-and-pome-
granate-molasses vinaigrette that dresses
chopped cucumbers, tomatoes, romaine
and mint.
Manaqish are the most pizzalike breads
at Ayat’s, baked in an oven until tender and
puffy around the rim. You can have one
spread with spiced ground beef, or one with
olive oil and za’atar, or you can get the Ara-
bic version of what the local pizzerias would
call a white slice, with mozzarella and crum-
bled akkawi cheese that melt around sesa-
me seeds and nigella.
Ayat is owned by Abdul Elenani and his
wife, Ayat Masoud. He is a constructioncontractor and an entrepreneur who appar-
ently likes to keep active. In addition to the
new restaurant, he owns three Cocoa Grind-
er coffee shops; Falahi Farms, a grocery
store with a halal butcher and deep port-
folios of dates, olives and other Middle East-
ern ingredients; and a Belgian fry shop
called Fritebar.
When the two are not tending to business
on Third Avenue, they are at home on Stat-
en Island, where they sometimes keep a 13-
year-old mare, Morgie, in a stable they built
at the end of their driveway.
Their new restaurant is named for Ms.
Masoud, a lawyer who was born in Brook-
lyn to parents who immigrated from Jeru-
salem. She is responsible for all the recipes
and all the cooking except the shawarma
and the markouk. Her view of Palestinian
cuisine is informed by her family’s tradi-
tions, which overlap with those of cooks
from the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and
Syria. Although the recipes enjoyed by Pal-
estinian families like Ms. Masoud’s may
have been passed down for many genera-
tions, the notion of a Palestinian cuisine is arelatively recent one.
In the United States, it is easier to read
about Palestinian food in cookbooks written
by Yasmin Khan, Reem Kassis and Sami
Tamimi than to find a restaurant that regu-
larly serves it. Complicating the hunt is the
large number of dishes that Palestinian
cooks share with others throughout the
Middle East, their templates the same from
Gaza to Aleppo even when their individual
recipes — a spice that is always used here
but is usually omitted somewhere else —
may contain information that ties them to a
specific village as precisely as a set of GPS
coordinates.
To my palate, at least, there is little to set
apart Ayat’s kebabs and shawarmas, al-
though they do suggest that Mr. Elenani has
very good sources of meat. (The beef, lamb
and chicken at the restaurant come from the
same farmers who supply Falahi Farms.)
Nor is there anything unusual about the
falafel, which has a lively crunch but is
somewhat more compact and less aromatic
than some other local purveyors’.
The dishes from the Palestinian home
cooking canon, though, are usually pre-
pared with painstaking care. Persian
squash are hollowed out as carefully as if
they were going to be made into tiny
stringed instruments instead of being
stuffed with rice and onions. Sticks of lamb
kefta, improbably delicate, are baked with
peppers, onions and potatoes in a tahini-
thickened lemon sauce so brightly Mediter-
ranean it almost shines.
If you have come at the right hour, you
can watch Fatima Fares make the markouk,
shaping one disk of dough after another. She
presses it out with the flat of her hand, while
somehow keeping the frilled ends of her
sleeves from becoming part of the bread,
then flips the dough onto an inflatable pil-
low that looks like something your great-
aunt might rest her feet on while doing
needlepoint.
With pinched fingertips she will tug at the
edge of the dough, stretching it into a circle
the size of a hubcap, working so quickly that
she seems to be merely issuing commands
that the dough obeys, like a show dog. She
will raise the air cushion above the saj and
invert it, letting the dough settle on the hot
dome. By the time the bread has cooked on
both sides, about a minute later, she already
has a fresh circle ready to drop.CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK PETE WELLSPalestinian Street Food, and Then Some
The menu has dishes rarely
seen outside private homes.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADAM FRIEDLANDER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESAdam Kolesar, who makes quality cocktail
syrups under the name Orgeat Works in
Brooklyn, approached his friend Jeff Berry
in 2018 with an offbeat idea: What if they
made a mai tai mix like the cocktail mixers
you see in the supermarket but, you know,
good?
Mr. Berry was skeptical.
“Premixes were something we were try-
ing to get away from in the early aughts,”
said Mr. Berry, an expert on tiki bars and an
owner of the New Orleans bar Latitude 29.
“To me, they were always the last refuge of
a scoundrel.”
“Mixer” has been a dirty word since the
cocktail revival began, evoking the industri-
ally manufactured drinks, filled with artifi-
cial ingredients and preservatives, that
have found a permanent place in many bars
after decades of use. They were intended to
mimic the flavors of citrus and sugar, and
make the bartender’s life easier.
But they ended up erasing cocktail know-
how and debasing the reputations of clas-
sics like the whiskey sour and the daiquiri.
In recent decades, enlightened bartenders
have started fighting back, with freshly
squeezed juice and handmade syrups.
And now, bringing things full circle, new
mixers have arrived, made with natural in-
gredients and an eye toward integrity. The
companies making them include Fresh Vic-
tor in San Francisco; Charismatic Cre-
ations and Pratt Standard Cocktail Co. in
the Washington, D.C., area; and Owl’s Brew
and Cheeky in New York City.
The pandemic, and the make-do-at-home
culture it has fostered, has played an unex-
pected role is getting thirsty consumers to
reconsider mixers.
“It was very hard to get people to buy into
it initially,” said Chrissy Sheffey, who
started Charismatic Creations in 2018. Ms.
Sheffey draws on fruits and herbs from ur-
ban gardeners to create potions like her
strawberry-basil-lemon mixer. “The first
year and a half, it was me having to pop up
around D.C. in order for people to taste
them. Then the pandemic happened.” Sales
on the website increased tenfold.
For April Wachtel, a hospitality-industry
veteran who founded Cheeky in 2015 as
Swing & Swallow, modern mixers were an
opportunity waiting to be seized.
“We know people want to drink great
cocktails,” she said. “We also know that not
a whole lot of people know how to make
them well.” Cheeky sells a wide array of bot-
tled juices and syrups that, when mixed and
matched and then combined with spirits,
lead to instant cosmopolitans, mojitos and
Gold Rushes.
Ms. Wachtel knew what she was up
against. The average cocktail consumer is a
lot savvier today than 20 years ago.
“We’re getting to the point where more
red flags go up when they read that ingredi-
ent list,” said Eric Tecosky, a brand ambas-
sador for Gentleman Jack, a whiskey line
under the Jack Daniel’s umbrella. When he
pitched the idea of putting out Jack Daniel’s
first-ever cocktail mixer — Gentleman Jack
Whiskey Sour Cocktail Mixer, released this
summer — he knew it had to be a straight
shooter. “There are three ingredients in
there,” he said, “lemon juice, sugar and wa-
ter.”
Rockey’s liqueur — made by Eamon
Rockey of the restaurant Betony, which is
now closed — is a bit more complicated but
just as natural. A mix of fruits and teas, it is
meant to convert any spirit into the sort of
deeply flavored clarified milk punch you
might order in a fancy cocktail bar.
Beyond home bartenders looking for thatmagic combination of quality and conven-
ience, high-volume bars and hotel bars are
the prime customers for many of these new
mixers, producers say.
H. Joseph Ehrmann, a partner in Fresh
Victor, knows that places like Elixir, the
craft cocktail bar he owns in San Francisco,
are not their audience. “But for the operator
who has more units or has more volume, it
makes total sense,” he said. “Bartenders
love not having to juice limes as part of their
job.”
Mr. Ehrmann believes that the timing
may be right to rebuild the reputation of
cocktail mixers. “That concept of sour mix
is almost lost on younger drinkers that have
come of age in the last 15 years,” he said.“And for the older drinker, they might think,
‘I remember the garbage I used to drink;
this is a big upgrade.’ ”
As for Mr. Kolesar of Orgeat Works, he
persisted with his notion of making a qual-
ity mixer. After two years and many trials,
he came up with something that met Mr.
Berry’s approval: Beachbum Berry’s Lati-
tude 29 Wiki Wiki Mai Tai Mix, which went
on the market in November, is a no-pre-
servatives syrup that needs only white
Puerto Rican rum and lime juice to make a
mai tai in a minute.
Mr. Berry has a good idea whom the ideal
customer for the mix might be: him.
“When I go on vacation, you can’t get a
decent mai tai to save your life,” he said.Cocktail Mixers Get
A Good Shaking Up
A craft bartender’s sensibility
creates inroads to consumers.
By ROBERT SIMONSONFor decades, the word
“mixers” evoked
industrially
manufactured drinks.
Newer options use
freshly squeezed juice
and handmade syrups.ADAM FRIEDLANDER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESRecommended DishesFried cauliflower;
muhammara; stuffed grape leaves; stuffed
squash; fattoush; all manaqish; grilled kefta;
beef shawarma; chicken shawarma; mus-
sakhan; kefta bi tahina; mansaf.
Drinks and WineThe fridge case in the back is
full of soft drinks, including some Middle Eastern
juices and sodas. Housemade drinks include
mint lemonade, sahlab, Arabian coffee and hot
mint tea.
PriceAppetizers, $3 to $9; main courses, $9 to
$30; grilled steaks, $38 to $44.
OpenDaily for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
ReservationsNot accepted.
Wheelchair AccessThe dining room and acces-
sible restroom are level with the sidewalk.
What the Stars Mean Because of the pandemic,
restaurants are not being given star ratings.AYAT
8504 THIRD AVENUE (86TH STREET),
BAY RIDGE, BROOKLYN; 718-831-2585.......................................................................................Top, Ayat’s dishes
include mussakhan,
center, sumac-seasoned
roast chicken with onions
set on a cushion of
taboon bread. Above left,
Fatima Fares stretching
dough. Above, the
restaurant on warm
days. Left, the owners
Ayat Masoud, the chef,
and her husband, Abdul
Elenani.