The Jordanian Way

food culture arabic-cuisine experience dining

The Arabs have some very traditional ways of dining. Whether it is at home or at a restaurant, you will always find their cultural ways present in every place. Amman, the capital city of Jordan is a very beautiful place to visit. I was quite mesmerized by their landscapes. For a tourist there are many places to visit, also food wise it's an interesting place, like any other middle eastern country. I must tell you that food in this part of the world is the best experience one can get. But the deal is that you should visit a local restaurant to experience it. If you visit restaurant of other cuisines, like Asian, Indian, Continental then you will not have the same experience.

Here in Oman also when we dine out, firstly the quantity is very good even at a fine dining restaurant. And there are always add-ons with food, like the hummus, olives or some salad. Not every place gives it but many of them do, especially the local ones. The international cuisine restaurants do not have these add-ons.

While in Amman, one of our friends invited me and hubby for a lunch meal. I always prefer to tell them that we are both small eaters so to not have too much food on the table, else a lot of it goes waste. He told us it would be ideal for us. When we visited the place, he asked us how would we like to sit. There are 2 ways of dining in their local places, one is the standard chair and table way and the other is sitting down on the ground. There are small rooms available for that, where there is a carpet laid and there you can sit down and eat. The locals prefer dining in this way. In Oman also we have similar ways. We chose to go on with our normal dining way with chair and table at use.

Every table had this unique set up, there is a big center dish on which all the small plates are served and this rotates, to pass from one person to another. The server told us that most of the times they would keep the food directly on the big dish and people would eat from that itself. There were all sorts of appetizers served, I thought it was as good as the main course, but he told us that the main course was yet to be served which was grilled meat.

By the end of the meal, we were stuffed. Our host told us that this was the most minimalist type of meal based on our request to go small. I wondered what would be a normal or a big meal look like. We could not finish even this much what was served to us. I enjoyed the salads but still it was a lot of food on the table just for the 3 of us. This is common in this part of the world; the Arabs are very hospitable when it comes to their guests. Here in Oman also when a local person invites us we make sure that we have skipped our previous meal before visiting them, because there is so much food served that one gets super stuffed.

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