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.
You can also taste it in the pomegranate-glazed beef cheeks that can be ordered atop the hummus. You wouldn’t find that combination in Lebanon, but the soft chunks of meat, glistening with fat and tangy syrup, feel fully integrated and essential resting on a cushion of silky, lemony dip.
There are other excellent dips in a more traditional vein: a chunky, loose muhammara with big pieces of walnuts and soft red peppers; deeply smoky baba ghanouj; labneh made from a mix of cow and sheep yogurt, dotted with olives, za’atar and a heady, fruity olive oil from Lebanon. Scoop these with the freshly made pita — puffy, pliable balloons that exhale steam as you tear into them.
You’ll find more of that olive oil drizzled over a riveting heirloom tomato salad. This one might read like another Brooklyn-Beirut mash-up, but it’s pure old-school Lebanon, a little-known dish of ripe mountain tomatoes spread with toum.
Let’s pause a moment to take in the toum. O toum! Cloudlike and pearly, and startlingly, ferociously garlicky! This froth of garlic and oil seems innocuous as you lift it to your mouth — until it bites you back.
Sawa’s version is sublime and utterly unrestrained. I was tempted to smear it on everything and even rub it on my cheeks like the toddler at the next table, but I settled for a lavish dollop on my batata hara — audibly crisp, salty fried potato cubes dusted with herbs. Sure, too much toum can hurt. But no toum at all hurts worse.
You could make a whole meal of these precisely rendered mezze, maybe filling in the corners with the pâté-like raw-kibbe nayeh, the tender tentacle of herby grilled octopus, or the chlorophyll-green tabbouleh braced with lemon.
But I’d suggest giving in to the siren song of lamb chops with labneh and mint leaves, since you can always take some home. These arrived grilled exactly as requested, rare and charred at the bone, perfect for gnawing, dabbed with a little toum for punch. Or go for the lamb shank that melts voluptuously off the bone into a pile of chewy freekeh, fava beans and black garlic. A whole daurade, served boneless but with the head so you can scoop out the cheeks, is cooked in a Beirut-style tomato-pepper sauce drizzled with cilantro oil. There’s also chicken (of course there’s chicken), which is good but doesn’t reach the same heights as the other entrees.
If the weather is nice, you can enjoy your pita-dipping, bone-stripping and toum worshiping in the peaceful garden, with its fig tree and rosebush (the grapevines are coming along). And in what feels like a white whale in New York dining, tables are arranged far apart, perfect for families with strollers and couples seeking private tête-à-têtes.
If it’s nippy, order a glass of Lebanese orange wine or a Light Sweater — a manhattan-like cocktail with an arak rinse — and sit inside, basking in the warmth of the open kitchen (expertly helmed by the chef Soroosh Golbabae, who used to work at Eyval and Sofreh).
The restaurant was designed by Mr. Boueri, an architect, who has created an elegant and modern space with white brick walls and warm wood details, blessedly offset by acoustic panels. The room’s quiet minimalism helps keep the focus on the vivacity on your plate, and just as important, the people at your table.
If you really like those people, you could share your nammoura, an orange-blossom-scented semolina cake that’s the standout of the dessert menu. On the other hand, they could just order their own.
Ms. Boueri Ziade remembers adoring nammoura as a child, but after so many years in New York, she now finds the classic Lebanese version too syrupy. At Sawa, hers is airier and brighter, layered with the complexity of a life lived far from home; it’s devoid of nostalgia but rich with memory. And it reminds us that nourishment is a vital response to calamity.
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