(Or, “In which I unsucessfully attempt to derail my roommates’ blog with a guest post”.)
There is a form of magnetism peculiar to booth seats in restaurants. As children, on a rare night out for spaghetti or ice cream, we would run squealing toward the periphery of the cafe, vaulting onto our elevated thrones of sticky red plastic. Now, serious adults though we are, we find ourselves irresistably drawn toward the banks of fused seating at the restaurant's back.
We continue to refer to this trip as our goat-eating expedition long after it becomes clear that this is not the season in which (as a friend has promised) one can order the whole animal spit-roasted, to be slowly dismembered over the course of a leisurely meal. We have no need for carcasses; Bay Ridge is exotic enough.
We emerge, after an hour-long train trip and a brief walk through a subway station whose grimy blue and white wall tiles recall a YMCA swimming pool, into the warm evening. We turn toward the first Arabic sign we see, only to discover that it marks a sad-looking shisha bar filled with listless teenagers. Bab Al-Yemen is across the street, its signage disappointingly Latinate and its windows papered with glowing reviews from the Times and the New Yorker—a reminder that we are not enacting that Manhattanite’s dream of playing Cabrillo to some outer borough’s neighborhood restaurant, but merely following a crowd.
Bab al-Yemen has three booths. The first is already colonized by our dopplegangers, a pod of four twentysomethings carrying a map and a page of downloaded reviews. The last is unoccupied but adorned with a curtain which, we observe under our breath, is probably intended for men who wish to conceal their wives from the other restaurant-goers. We chose the middle.
This, we quickly discover, is comically narrow. We are forced to slowly and methodically slide ourselves into the seats, interleaving legs, elbows and table struts and, realizing that we are expected to eat with our hands, to unfold ourselves again, toddling one-by-one to the washroom for a vigorous scrubbing.
The menu, English recto and Arabic verso, seems to consist almost entirely of slabs of chicken and lamb simmered at great length in various more or less indistinguishable sauces. We chose randomly, but incorrectly: the kitchen has run out of our first choice, and our second, and our third. We eventually allow the waiter to order for us.
The food arrives first as four bowls of unasked-for soup which look like lemonade and taste like flesh; next as a stack of tumescent flatbreads; finally as endless plates of egg and stew and pilaf for whose wild polymorphism the menu has left us unprepared.
We burn our fingers, submerging them in still-bubbling cast iron pots as we try to dip our bread. We muddy our soup bowls, polluting them with stray pieces of meat and albumen which drop from our unexpert fingers. If there is a graceful way of eating rice with one’s hands, we do not discover it—instead stuffing contorted fists full of oily grains directly into our mouths.
Everything is delicious. We eat until we are full, and then order another piece of bread and keep eating.