The Observer
Jay Rayner journeyed to west Wales to taste the “delightful cooking that deserves a wider audience” of Ghofran Hamza, who arrived six years ago as a Syrian refugee after a spell in Lebanon. Having started out cooking with her mother in a Syrian supper club, she now cooks solo in the restaurant she runs with her Greek partner.
“There’s something deeply emotional and intense about this cooking,” says Jay. “It is cooking that traces a journey, from dish to dish, from one life to another. Hamza has lived an awful lot of that life for someone still only in her mid-20s.”
Her food is a particularly vivid take on familiar Middle Eastern dishes, with plenty of pomegranate molasses, roasted cashews and “the raunchy purple citrus of sumac”. “Most diverting is the hummus fatteh, a dish of whole chickpeas bound in a garlicky tahini sauce. Fragments of crisp, just-fried pitta have been stirred through it all.”
Instead of buying in baklava, like so many Middle Eastern spots, she bakes her own – “they are crisp and then soft, and sticky with syrup and toasty nuts, and a foaming ocean away from those dusty, tensed examples that usually turn up.”
Jay Rayner - 2024-05-19
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