This is the second in a new series of posts based on the Middle East trip, which took place mainly in May. The first post in this series dealt with breakfasts eaten during the trip. This time I’m going to look at the lunches and dinners we ate in Jordan. You don’t need to talk to your government every day but you do need to eat three times a day, so food is critical for travellers and constitutes one of the main avenues through which they engage with their hosts.
One week in a country lets you sample a number of different dishes if you are interested in trying new food. Restaurants in Amman and Petra in Jordan often cater to tourists, whose spending constitutes a major component of the economy. Especially in Wadi Musa, the town that services the remnants of the ancient Nabataean city of Petra. In the end, though, once we had found reliable options we tended to gravitate to the same restaurants and order the same dishes.
Food in Jordan is quite pricey in most locations but I think that tourists probably pay more than locals do for the same choices in the menu. I never saw a menu written in Arabic and anyway I cannot read Arabic, so it was impossible for me to know for sure how much residents pay for the food they eat in restaurants. One of the reliable options we identified was mansaf with lamb, which is a kind of stew that comes with Basmati rice on the side and a yoghurt sauce, so it was easy enough to find good things in most places. The yoghurt sauce is watery and a bit sour and it comes in a dish separate from the lamb and rice, which are served separate from each other on a plate. You can put the sauce on your rice or on your lamb and it tastes very nice with both or with either.
Jordanians enjoy this dish as well, and in order to do so every year they import from Australia large numbers of live sheep; there was a detail on this part of the country’s economy included in a display at the Jordan Museum but I didn’t make a note to record it. Australia’s Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development says 10 percent of the country’s exported live sheep went to Jordan in 2017, and that in that year the total number sent to all countries was 1.7 million head.
One moment served to illustrate for me how in Jordan mansaf stew is a local favourite and that people there eat it when they want to enjoy a special treat. The driver who took us back from Petra to Amman on our last full day in the country was named Maruan and he stopped by his sister’s place to pick up some money that his nephew had promised him on account of Ramadan. At the same time as he did this, she gave him a bag of the yoghurt sauce that is used to make mansaf (which can be made with either chicken or lamb) and as he got back in the taxi, where we were waiting for him to emerge from his relative’s house across the road from us, he told us how expensive the sauce is. Unfortunately I didn’t make a note of this detail on my phone.
One week in a country lets you sample a number of different dishes if you are interested in trying new food. Restaurants in Amman and Petra in Jordan often cater to tourists, whose spending constitutes a major component of the economy. Especially in Wadi Musa, the town that services the remnants of the ancient Nabataean city of Petra. In the end, though, once we had found reliable options we tended to gravitate to the same restaurants and order the same dishes.
Food in Jordan is quite pricey in most locations but I think that tourists probably pay more than locals do for the same choices in the menu. I never saw a menu written in Arabic and anyway I cannot read Arabic, so it was impossible for me to know for sure how much residents pay for the food they eat in restaurants. One of the reliable options we identified was mansaf with lamb, which is a kind of stew that comes with Basmati rice on the side and a yoghurt sauce, so it was easy enough to find good things in most places. The yoghurt sauce is watery and a bit sour and it comes in a dish separate from the lamb and rice, which are served separate from each other on a plate. You can put the sauce on your rice or on your lamb and it tastes very nice with both or with either.
Jordanians enjoy this dish as well, and in order to do so every year they import from Australia large numbers of live sheep; there was a detail on this part of the country’s economy included in a display at the Jordan Museum but I didn’t make a note to record it. Australia’s Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development says 10 percent of the country’s exported live sheep went to Jordan in 2017, and that in that year the total number sent to all countries was 1.7 million head.
One moment served to illustrate for me how in Jordan mansaf stew is a local favourite and that people there eat it when they want to enjoy a special treat. The driver who took us back from Petra to Amman on our last full day in the country was named Maruan and he stopped by his sister’s place to pick up some money that his nephew had promised him on account of Ramadan. At the same time as he did this, she gave him a bag of the yoghurt sauce that is used to make mansaf (which can be made with either chicken or lamb) and as he got back in the taxi, where we were waiting for him to emerge from his relative’s house across the road from us, he told us how expensive the sauce is. Unfortunately I didn’t make a note of this detail on my phone.
Our Amman hotel was situated right smack-bang in the middle of the downtown area of the city so we could easily walk to the streets where the shops and restaurants are located. The photo above shows a footpath outside a restaurant in the area sometime before fasting ended on day one of our stay in the city. During Ramadan people wait for the town’s cannon to go off before eating but in the hours before that they congregate on tables on the pavements in preparation for the end of fasting.
The photo below was also taken on day one in Amman, in the Afra Restaurant and Café. We ordered a plate of hummus and beef, and bowl of mushroom soup. For drinks we ordered a fruit cocktail (there was no alcohol served in the place during Ramadan) and a Pepsi. The hummus, which was served with a basketful of discs of pita bread each of which was about 10 inches in diameter, was very good indeed. It had a fruity flavour and a creamy consistency unlike the tart rough spread you often get in Sydney. The meal came to just over 13 Jordanian dinars (I ended up having two Pepsis) and I gave the man at the cash register 15JD (A$30) and said thank you. This was pricey considering we had had only a small amount of food.
The next day (day two) we had lunch at the Rome Pizza Restaurant in the Pasha Hotel. We ate lamb kebabs with French fries. The meal came to 15JD (A$30) for both of us. We went back there for dinner as the place is just up the road from our hotel and it serves alcohol during Ramadan.
The food we ordered for dinner was mansaf with lamb, kufteh (mince beef with tomato on top), and a dish named zeid zatar (or "poor man’s food") made from olive oil, sesame, zatar (a kind of herb that, we were told, grows in the mountains), and vinegar. The zeid zatar is a dip and it was given to us on the house by the hotel owner, who invented it and who serves it in his establishment. With his companions he happened to take a table next to us and he spoke good English having lived for a while in Perth. We also had a Greek salad and my travelling companion had a bowl of cream of mushroom soup, which is often served in restaurants in Jordan but is not always of the same quality in every restaurant. The meal came to 29JD (about A$60, so, again, not cheap).
We had visited Rainbow Street on day two and the next day we ended up near there again at a restaurant that was open during the day during Ramadan. It is located in what is called the Wild Jordan Center that also has a gift shop and an information desk. Lots of tourists use the place as a resort and there were young people on a number of couches that had been placed in front of tables on one level of the space. Some of them were using laptops. After we sat down in the restaurant I had a burger and my friend and I shared a delicious salad made from lettuce and baby tomatoes and halloumi. It had a pomegranate dressing and the meal for two came to 26.2JD (A$52). My friend ate this for her main course:
In the evening of day three we went to Boulevard Abdeli Mall and at Café Italia we had some pasta for dinner but it wasn’t very good and as usual was pricey (26.4JD, equal to A$54). In Petra the next day, after the long drive south in the taxi, for lunch we had more local food: maglouba, a Greek salad, and sambusak (deep-fried cheese pockets). Maglouba is a chicken dish served with rice and yoghurt but the chicken was overcooked and the meal wasn’t too hot all round. It cost less than 30JD (A$60) all up, including drinks.
For dinner that night we went to a restaurant in Wadi Musa. We had wandered around the town looking for a place to eat after getting a taxi from the hotel to the town centre. One restaurant that was “open” was allowing people to sit at tables and use the wifi and order drinks in the time that remained before the cannon went off to announce the end of fasting. We had had the same experience the night before in Amman where the restaurant we chose would only serve us drinks before 9.30pm.
When we sat down at the Wadi Musa restaurant, which we had chosen because it allowed people to order food before 7.30pm, I ordered a mushroom soup but it wasn’t nearly as good as one I had had in Amman. This time it was just instant packet soup that had had water added to it. We also had a plate of grilled lamb that came with Turkish bread that had been spread with a salsa made from tomatoes and chilli. It came with some surprisingly tough French fries. The manager also gave us a bowl of diced tomato and cucumber with a dressing on it, which was very nice because it was on the house; there had been some confusion over the food order. The wait staff were from the subcontinent but their English was not very good. With its tangy flavour, the bread they served us on the other hand was excellent. The meal, including two bottles of water, came to a 12JD (A$25) and it was much better than our lunch had been.
The next day we spent in Petra and we didn’t eat anything for lunch because we were walking all day: about nine hours all up. For dinner, in an exhausted and relieved state, we stopped at the Sandstone Restaurant on the main drag near the hotel and ordered mansaf with lamb and a vegetarian dish which also came with rice. With it we each had a glass of fresh orange juice. In total the meal came to 26JD (A$52) and the waiter brought us some sweets at the end so I tipped the staff 1JD (A$2) after paying.
On day thee in Petra we went to Wadi Rum and for lunch the driver bought us a pizza from a Pizza Hut that had agreed to make the food for us during the day. We had driven around Aqaba, where we had come to see the Red Sea, looking for somewhere that was open but had finally almost given up. The fast-food outlet was a last ditch effort by Khalid, the taxi driver we had hired for the day, to get us something to eat. He told us that he would give us the food but when we were almost back at Wadi Musa he added the price of the pizza plus two soft drinks (20JD, equal to A$40) to his fee for the day’s driving and we had a blazing row in his taxi. That night we gave up the field to fatigue brought on by the frustrations of the afternoon and had a buffet dinner in the hotel restaurant. This cost 30JD (A$60) for both of us.
Back in Amman, after the 250km drive from Petra, we ate a meal (combined lunch and dinner) that comprised reliable dishes we had enjoyed before: mansaf with lamb, kufteh with tomato sauce, and a Greek salad, and two beers for me. Which came to 33.6JD all up (A$67.20). I am pretty sure that this meal was taken at the Pasha Hotel, but I didn’t make a note of the location.
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