When Samaya Boueri Ziade moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn, in 2009, she found no restaurants with exactly the sort of Lebanese food she remembered from her hometown, Tabarja, a coastal village north of Beirut. So she thought about opening one herself.
She could picture it — a welcoming place with creamy white walls and pops of Mediterranean blue, serving a mix of beloved Lebanese classics (hummus, tabbouleh and kibbe) and less-famous regional dishes, sweetened with pomegranate molasses, soured with sumac, perfumed with allspice. There would be a garden with a fig tree, roses and grapevines, so she could harvest the new green leaves in summer to stuff with chickpeas and rice. It would be the Lebanon of her childhood.
That Lebanon is hard to discern today, after years of internal strife and economic collapse, and now the devastation from Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah.
But Ms. Boueri Ziade kept the dream alive. She raised two kids, occasionally hosting Levantine pop-ups around the city. The longer she lived in Brooklyn, the more it entered her bloodstream — the borough’s style, verve and grit melding with her Lebanese nature. By the time she opened Sawa last April with her brother, George Boueri, she’d changed.
Sawa is the essence of that evolution, and you can see it on the menu. Though firmly anchored in Lebanese cuisine, it has an element of temperate-zone seasonality, a dash of hipster cool and some New York pluck layered into the elegant Levantine originals. It’s Beirut by way of Brooklyn, but via the local.
This inimitable balance is evident in the fattoush salad, where local Little Gem lettuces and grilled nectarines mingle with the usual red onions, cucumbers, purslane and crisp pita, for an exuberant expression of the dish.
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