If there’s one thing that has brought us all closer together during the covid pandemic, it’s food!
That’s why, for the next few months, I’ve like to concentrate on an obsession shared by both Americans and the French. I am not going to tell you about what I cook or about the lines I stand in to get into a supermarket before curfew time at 7 PM. No, I want to take you taste-travelling through the streets of Paris and around the world.
First stop, for some excellent daily bread, “le Daily Syrien.” Basem Albatin, the chef, arrives early to prepare the dough and wait for it to rise. He and his cuistots, his assistant cooks, will then roll it out and begin making “fatayers,” Syrian-style bread rolls filled with lemony spinach, ground meat subtly flavored with cumin and cinnamon, or Akawi, a mild white cheese, much less salty than feta. At the Daily Syrien, they make their own, and the fatayers are made fresh every day.
I discovered the Daily Syrien about six years ago while wandering through the streets of Paris, one of the best ways to get to know this city. The “flagship” restaurant, which opened its doors in 2010, is located at 55, rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, a busy, multi-ethnic market street in the 10th district of Paris. At number 72, is Daily Syrien Veggie, whose name says it all.
In Paris, there are a lot of Middle Eastern restaurants, and I’ve tested many of them, but only to the Daily Syrien do I regularly return. A week ago, after all these years, I met Chef Basem, brother of the restaurant’s founder Ahmed Albatin. After a long conversation, I now understand why I keep coming back for more and why the Daily Syrien stands out.
First of all, Basem loves every aspect of his job. Once a week he gets up early and travels to Rungis, the giant wholesale food market to the south of Paris supplying the Paris region and all of France. He visits the butchers and chooses his own meat for his homemade Makanek sausages, tiny spiced beef sausages, with just the slightest and tastiest note of hot pepper. To make his gyro sandwich, instead of using a spit, he braises the chicken or beef he has selected at Rungis, after letting them marinate for three days in a special mix of spices.
“Daily,” “fresh,” these two words sum up the menu at the Daily Syrien. At the end of the day, Basem and his staff take the leftovers home. Each morning, they start over from scratch. Three times a week, fresh vegetables are delivered to the restaurant door, and the chef inspects them to make sure they’re up to his standards. The parsley for the tabouleh salad is green; the vine-ripened tomatoes, red (I know, Basem proudly showed them to me).
As for the falafel, it is truly just like Mom used to make. Every evening, chickpeas are set aside to soak. Every morning, they are ground, along with spices and other ingredients, to make the mixture for falafel balls. At the Daily Syrien, they are not prepared in advance and then heated in a microwave oven. The mixture is fried before your very eyes, especially for you, and you get the freshest falafel sandwich around.
Back in pre-covid days, at the Daily Syrien, everybody sat down at a long wooden table taking up pretty much all the dining space and ate together, which seems appropriate as we were sitting down to a “home-cooked” meal. Then and now, the restaurant also offers a delicatessen service, a big refrigerator case filled with salads and vegetable dishes, Middle Eastern mezzes such as hummus, stuffed grape leaves, eggplant moussaka, and other lentil and eggplant salads, made fresh every day. There are also a few shelves of Middle Eastern products, tahini sauce, Syrian coffee, pomegranate molasses, a tangy sweetener used in Middle Eastern cuisine.
Basem also offers for sale big jars of turnips pickled in red beet juice. I asked him what they were because to my Pennsylvania eye, they looked a lot like pickled eggs. I explained to him how my mom made those and he was very interested. At Daily Syrien Veggie, he is experimenting with new recipes and has come up with some creations where beet juice plays an important role.
But, for the moment, Daily Syrien Veggie is closed, and were it not for the delicatessen and takeout service, the Daily Syrien would be too. Today nowhere in France can you sit down to a meal in a restaurant. This has been hard on Basem and his brother Ahmed. Daily Syrien Veggie only opened its doors in autumn 2019, a few months before the first quarantine began on March 17, 2020. Since then, they were open for a few months last summer and hope to reopen soon.
By now readers may have guessed where Basem learned to cook: in his family home, in a part of Syria squeezed between Lebanon, Jordan and the Golan Heights. There he learned to make cheese from milk from the family cow that he milked himself; he also learned to make mouhalabieh, a delicate milk pudding flavored with orange blossom water and sprinkled with pistachio nuts. He learned to pickle turnips and make preserved vegetables in barrels on the family’s terrace, where they also had a rooftop garden for growing all their own produce. He grew up helping to prepare all the dishes he prepares for us today.
The curfew and the successive quarantines have been hard on business at the Daily Syrien, but Basem Albatin works hard and does not despair, a luxury he cannot afford. Since his arrival in France in 2010, he met his wife and has started a family. He and his brother Ahmed are also responsible for their family in Syria. Not only must they keep their business running, they must help those they’ve left behind. Basem told me that by simply stepping outside to shop, Syrians risk their lives. They could all too easily become victims, not of covid, but of their brutal 10-year civil war.
If ever you travel to Paris, I’d highly recommend a stop at the Daily Syrien. If not, I’m hoping taste-travel has brought home some of the flavors of Paris and Syria.
