Yemen Yums

One of the great things about the town where we live is that there are so many foreign workers who bring their delicious food to Saudi Arabia. We love to eat bukhari from Afghanistan, and frequent the Pakistani naan place at least once a month. There is also a delicious Indian food place near our compound, which has better food than what we ate in India! 

This past weekend we went out for breakfast at a place called Vitamin (or feetameen if you are sounding it out in Arabic), which sells Yemeni food. One of Brian's coworkers had taken him to this restaurant a few weeks ago for breakfast after working the night shift. Vitamin is a small shop on a busy street; most people passing by probably wouldn't give it a second glance. 

Apparently this says Vitamin!

Many restaurants in Saudi Arabia are segregated--single men sit on one side, and families or women without their husbands sit on the other. They have separate entrances, and the two sections are usually divided by a wall or they are on separate floors.  It is always a little unclear, however, what we're supposed to do when we try to eat at a restaurant that does not have a designated family section. Once, we tried to go to an Arabic food place without a family section, and I was stopped at the door by a man who wagged his finger at me.  We took our food to go. However, the last two times we've tried new places, I've been (somewhat) welcomed in. This was the case for our Yemeni breakfast place. 

We walked into Vitamin and the men working saw Brian and started screaming "Amreeki Amreeki!" which is the Arabic word for American. We're not sure if they remembered him from the last time or if they just assumed we were American, but either way they were really excited to see us. 

We walked up to the counter and were given an "English" menu full of things like mexique shakshouka and Uou.S.A (no clue). Their lack of English speaking ability combined with their intense desire to make sure we enjoyed our meal led the men working to call in another man from off the street, who knew key vocabulary words like eggs and spicy.  He helped us order.

These scribbles mean we're getting something good!

We ordered a number of different dishes, each more delicious than the last. First up was a falafel sandwich. Though we probably could have done without it (we ordered SO much other food), the price was right at just about $0.50. I particularly enjoyed the smattering of French fries on the sandwich, as is typical in this area of the world. Not so typical was the entire sliced hard boiled egg, but we were there at breakfast time... 

A substantial falafel sandwich for only 50 cents!

Next was fasoulia, which consisted of very finely chopped scrambled eggs mixed with spicy beans, then baked until a nice crust formed on top. It was served with an enormous warm flatbread, which somehow managed to be both soft and crusty at the same time. 

Eggs + Beans = Delicious Breakfast

Biggest flatbread ever!

Finally, we had masoub, which is one of the things Brian raved about after going to Vitamin with his coworker. It is made up of bananas, bread, honey, and probably a lot of other good stuff, and has the texture of oatmeal with a taste similar to banana bread. 

This was the bomb!  So good!

As we were eating, one of the workers came around and brought us a cup of tea. Or was it coffee? He didn't know enough English to tell us anything except that it was free. Remarkably, it tasted like Louisiana sweet tea, only hot, and with a slight flavor of cardamom. I shudder to think of how much sweetened condensed milk went into it to turn it that color, but it was definitely worth the calories. 

Coffee?  Tea?  It didn't matter, it was amazing

Total cost of breakfast (including 2 bottles of water):  $7
Sitting in a restaurant in Saudi NOT in the family section:  priceless 

I do what I want