I’m most definitely biased here, but I can’t think of anything I’d rather eat for breakfast (or lunch) than manakeesh: hot, thin-crusted pita-bread pies covered in olive oil and zaatar, an almost startlingly tangy blend of sesame seeds, sumac, and wild thyme or oregano. With a dab of creamy labneh (strained yogurt) on top, they’re truly heaven. I grew up eating these morning, noon, and night in Beirut, and since I mentioned them briefly in an article I wrote for the Economist’s website this summer, I’ve been getting lots of questions about them.
It’s hard to find a perfect version in NYC, but a couple I’ve tried come pretty close: the ones at Bread & Olive in midtown, and the one I just had yesterday at the tiny Gazala Place in Hell’s Kitchen. Gazala is a two-year-old spot that focuses on the foods of the Druze, a small religious community found mainly in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel; but since the Middle Eastern culinary repertoire is very similar across borders, with some local variations here and there, you’ll find manakeesh all over the region. At Gazala Place, they’re cooked on a “sage,” an open round-topped oven used for making manakeesh and other breads in the Middle East. At Gazala, the zaatar pies are called “mancosha”—and since the word is a transliteration from the Arabic anyway, expect to come across any number of English spellings in restaurants. You’re mainly looking for the “m”, “n,” “k,” and “sh” sounds, in that order, separated by vowels. How’s that for freshman-level linguistics.
The mancosha at Gazala is $4.50. At Bread & Olive, where the pies are cooked in a brick oven and wrapped up with vegetables, they’re $6 (and are just called “zaatar.”) Order the pie plain first and try it on its own, sans labneh or vegetables or anything. Then order up some labneh to spread on top—creamy, tart deliciousness.