Syria: Road to Damascus
Published in The Observer, 24 August 2008
After decades out in the cold, shunned by Western travellers and overshadowed by its faster-moving neighbours, Syria is – slowly – starting to gain the recognition it deserves as a vibrant, fascinating country. If you’ve never visited, whatever you’ve heard about the place is quite likely to be wrong. Political rhetoric notwithstanding, there’s a more tangible air of menace in Guildford.
As the country opens up to outsiders, ways to explore it multiply. I had visited Damascus before, but this time I was going to experience it with Anissa Helou, chef, broadcaster and writer on the cuisines of the Mediterranean. A Londoner for twenty years, Anissa grew up in Beirut but remembers idyllic childhood summers spent in the Syrian highlands. Now she is returning to launch small-group culinary tours, taking ingredients, cooking styles and methods of production as a starting point from which to explore.
Admiring Damascus’s historical monuments, or taking time to appreciate the architecture, was firmly off the agenda. Instead, we scoured the souk. I watched as Anissa strode through the crowded lanes, casting to left and right, stopping to see how an old man fries omelettes, pausing to ask a passer-by how she prepares her vegetables, picking out oranges piled on a barrow.
I followed her into the back lanes where we discovered a half-hidden factory making sugared almonds, a single, bare room lined with great copper drums for turning the toasted nuts in syrup. The manager, Qusay Sukkari (sukkar is the Arabic word for sugar – delightfully enough, this was Mr Sugary the Sweetmaker), welcomed us and explained the process, but apologised for having none of the product to sample. No matter, we said, and nipped round the corner to buy qatayyif – sweet pastries filled with clotted cream, deep-fried to a crunch and drenched in treacle. Old-fashioned calories still matter in Syria.
We spent the day working our way through the different areas of the souk, buying zaatar – a fragrant blend of thyme, marjoram and sesame – in the Souk al-Bzouriya (‘Seeds Market’), sampling boiled sweets and sipping fresh mulberry juice. Then we headed over to the Souk al-Tanabel (‘Lazybones Market’), which sells only pre-prepared vegetables, the stalls piled with bags of sliced carrots, cored squash and ready-chopped herbs – convenience shopping for busy mums, Syrian-style.
And we ate in a succession of fabulous restaurants – Al-Khawali, for one. Occupying an eye-popping 14th-century palace in the heart of the Damascus souk, this mainstay of Syrian power-dining stands concealed from the street’s bustle by beautifully carved wooden doors. Inside, floors of patterned marble led us to an airy internal courtyard, with tables laid around a central fountain beside jasmine and citrus trees. Anissa ordered a clutch of mezze – small, sampler-style dishes that crowded the table with flavours, textures and aromas, ranging from familiar yalangi (stuffed vine leaves) to exquisite shanklish, a tangy sheep’s cheese dusted with pepper and thyme. We dipped and nibbled our way through eight or ten mezze dishes, plus mains of tender grilled lamb: the food – formal, sophisticated, charming – suited the ambience perfectly.
Old Town, a rather unimaginatively named restaurant in Damascus’s Christian Quarter, was another highlight, serving pungent, fiery muhammara – a spicy dip of chopped walnuts and red pepper – and succulent kebabs of chicken.
The culinary adventures continued four hours north in Aleppo, where we met up with the vastly knowledgeable Hassan Khouja, a researcher from the Académie Syrienne de la Gastronomie (such a body does exist), for a meal at Bazar ash-Sharq, a restaurant hidden in vaulted cellars just outside the old city walls.
Hassan claimed this was the best kitchen in Aleppo. Their kibbeh nayeh, raw lamb chopped with spices and burghul – one of the most difficult of mezze dishes to get right – was superb: soft, moist and earthily flavourful. As we tucked into Aleppan meatballs with quince, Hassan explained Syria’s culinary roots, and how Aleppo’s location on the east–west Silk Road historically drew in both Persian and Turkish influence, most notably with the mixing of savoury and sweet in the city’s trademark spicy kebabs with sour cherries.
Damascus, on the other hand, far to the south and cut off from eastern influence by the desert, always looked more to Lebanese mountain cuisine for subtler combinations of herbs, beans and vegetables in mezze dishes and salads.
And the difference was still tangible: the zaatar we bought in Aleppo was sharper and more peppery than Damascus’s, and while our Damascene sweet treats were candied apricots and local ice cream – egg-free and beaten by hand – in Aleppo we were offered elegantly crafted confections of spun sugar with Iranian pistachio nuts.
As well as hosting world-class restaurants, Syria is also starting to take a leaf out of Morocco’s boutique-hotel book. The lanes of Damascus’s Bab Touma district shelter a number of upmarket conversions of 17th- and 18th-century courtyard town houses. At Beit al-Mamlouka – the first and still one of the most stylish – all eight bedrooms were all occupied when we visited, but the engaging owner, May Mamarbachi, nonetheless served us tea in the orange-scented courtyard and showed us around, pointing out original features and inviting us to return.
While I plumped for a simple room above the workshop of Syrian sculptor Mustafa Ali, Anissa stayed first at the Dar al-Yasmin, another heritage conversion featuring marble fountains and beautiful pointed arches, then moved to the Talisman, a small hotel converted from a wealthy merchant’s residence on a dusty lane in the old Jewish Quarter. The Talisman’s French owners have deliberately overlaid the traditional Syrian architecture with a ragbag of design elements: Indian trinkets hang beside Cairene lamps, while a Moroccan red wash covers the walls – more gaudy than chic.
Rather more endearing was the Mansouriya Palace, down a narrow alleyway near the medieval Bab Qunisreen gateway in Aleppo’s old quarter. Within another serene mansion of white marble, its courtyard shaded by Seville orange trees, we investigated all nine suites, each wildly over-themed to the point of kitsch. The Hittite Suite comes complete with stone lions flanking the bed, its bath and sink carved from single blocks of marble, while the Ottoman Suite is dominated by a four-poster bed bedecked in swags of heavy silk.
But the real discovery remained the food. Bypassing Syria’s famous ruins for an indulgent week of near-continuous eating and snacking in the company of Anissa, whose knowledge and enthusiasm are boundless, turned out to be a great way to get under the skin of this often hard-to-fathom country. Food is one field where Syria excels, and it deserves to be celebrated.