For lunch yesterday, I met up with a visiting Malaccan friend, and we decided to try out Halab’s new Yemeni menu items, a fresh change from its usual Syrian offerings. Very interesting regional variant of Arabic food.
We started off with a tabouleh salad from its main (Syrian) menu, as the rather limited-time special Yemeni one did not offer any starter options.
For mains, we tried out two Yemeni options:
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Fahsah lamb, which was finely-chopped lamb, stewed in lamb broth, and with spices like fenugreek added:
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Akda chicken, minced chicken-meat, cooked with potatoes & vegetables.
Both mains were served with Mulawah, a crisp flatbread.
For desserts, we tried the Arika Halab, a very, very sweet Yemeni bread-and-cream pudding, containing honey, chopped dates, pistachios and almonds.
A light, hot green tea was the perfect accompaniment to the very sweet dessert.
I might return at a later date for the Salta lamb dish - a lamb casserole of minced lamb, egg and vegetables on rice, which is the Yemeni national dish.
There’s a good reason why Halab offered Yemeni, over other Arab regional cuisines here: modern-day Yemen encompassed what used to be known as Hadhramaut, which covered the sea-fronting southern part of the Arabian peninsula. The Hadhrami-Arabs were subsequently seafarers, compared to their desert cousins, and were the earliest Arabs who came to this part of the world, from the 19th-century onwards. Most Penangites of Arab descent (just like the Arab-Singaporeans) would very likely be Hadhrami.
