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Jasmine and Fire: A Bittersweet Year in Beirut

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:30:28 +0000

If you’ve visited Salmaland before or followed me on Twitter, you’ve seen me drop hints about my upcoming book, a memoir of the year I spent in Beirut trying to come home again. Now I can do more than hint about it: I’m thrilled to announce that Jasmine and Fire: A Bittersweet Year in Beirut, comes out this May from Broadway Books/Random House—and it’s ready to preorder now. Please preorder it via Amazon, Kindle, BN.com, Nook, IndieBound.org, and iBookstore and big thanks in advance for all your support!! More soon, Salma

Welcome to Salmaland

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:27:26 +0000

What is Salmaland? It’s a place where you can find quick, painless answers to the eternal question, “Where should I eat?” To the left, you’ll find my current short-lists of Where to Eat in NYC, by neighborhood; or use the search tool to the right to look up a cuisine or restaurant. You’ll find a Where to Drink list on the left too. And down the middle, just below, are reports on my latest comings and goings. My recent Beirut adventures are here. Find me on Twitter (@salmaland). And for more about Salmaland, click on the “read more” link right here…

How Salmaland Works:

The lists on the left are broken down by neighborhood—with more boroughs (including many more Brooklyn options) and neighborhoods, and cities, on the way at some point. You’ll also find a variety of cuisines, environments, and price points, so whatever style or price-level of restaurant you’re looking for, I hope you’ll find it right here.

The restaurant and bar recommendations on Salmaland are by no means comprehensive; they’re not meant to be. If they’re doing their job, they should be quick, easy-to-use, and headache-free. And I’ll be keeping them fresh by rotating in new material on a regular basis, so keep checking back. And down the middle of the page, you’ll find my notes on recent food adventures. I’ll be posting these at least weekly, to let you know about delicious discoveries that are worth your time (or hot new restaurants that aren’t).

To search more specifically by cuisine or restaurant name, or by feature or price-range (like “Cheap,” “Moderately Priced,” “Elegant,” “Good for Groups,” “Vegetarian-Friendly,” or “Drink Destination”), or to search by just about any word you can think of, type your term into the search-engine box (with the little magnifying glass above it) in the upper-right corner.

Please note: I’m mostly avoiding listing the generally exceptional, duly-noted restaurants that you probably already know about (the Le Bernardins, the Daniels, the Babbos, the Gramercy Taverns, etc.). I might include them occasionally, if I have some compelling reason to bring them up. Otherwise, let’s skip ahead to the places you may not know but definitely should, or may have forgotten, or can’t really live without knowing about.

Please also note: These lists represent my honest opinions; that’s all. There is no paid-for content on Salmaland. If any ads ever show up, they will be very, very clearly indicated as such—and will in no way influence editorial opinion.

Oh, and one last thing: What exactly is 1623 (the number at the top of this page) all about? I could say: “It’s the year when everyone else got a website, and here I am four centuries later.” But that wouldn’t be true—only vaguely true. And it wouldn’t be all that funny either. The strange truth is: It’s the number on a street sign that my friend Pableaux Johnson—New Orleans-based food writer and guru of all things gastronomically glorious and debauched—photographed somewhere in his hometown. I just like the way it looks. Pableaux also designed this website (actually, he encouraged me to create it in the first place).

I hope you’ll come back often, and thanks for reading.

In With the New

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:25:58 +0000

Detail from ex-mural on Houston St. by Brazilian artists Os Gemeos

Just a quick note to say hi and happy new year to all readers, friends, and anyone stumbling onto Salmaland for the first time. It’s been quite a year–Beirut, New York, a book deadline–and I hope yours has been as eventful, and unexpected (in good ways), and memorable, and thrilling, and eccentric–pick your adjective.

As I’ve been buried in finishing up my memoir, Jasmine and Fire, over the past few months, I’ve managed to surface for a few minutes here and there to make little updates to the restaurant and bar lists on Salmaland. But mostly I’ve been caught up in nonstop work and looking a lot like the gal in the painting to the right. Now that I’m just about done getting the book into production and ready for a summer 2012 launch, I’ll be making lots more new additions to Salmaland in the coming weeks and months, so watch this space. In the meantime, cheers to a wild 2011, and all good wishes for a fantastic 2012. Bawseh! (“kiss” in Arabic) — Salma

Meet Me in Texas

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 13:00:11 +0000

Getting pangs of homesickness for Texas—been too long since I’ve been back. Just got done spending the whole past year in Beirut (and this summer buried in my laptop) finishing up a book about my search for home. So, where is home, ultimately? Stay tuned… the book will be published by Broadway Books/Random House in summer 2012. In the meantime, I’m going back to one of my former homes—Texas, that is—the second weekend in October to teach a writing class for Gemini Ink, a non-profit literary and arts organization. On Friday, October 7, I’ll do a reading from my manuscript, and Saturday, October, 8 I’ll teach a small-group writing class themed around the topic “Where is Home?” If you’ll be anywhere near San Antonio, join me! Sign up here.

Salmaland in ForbesLife

Sat, 14 May 2011 15:07:07 +0000

That's yours truly in Byblos, Lebanon, from a pic in the ForbesLife essay.

For anyone who has asked, “How’s your year in Beirut going?”….here’s the beginning of an answer: An essay I wrote for ForbesLife about my experience in Beirut so far just came out in the May 2011 issue. The rest will be revealed when my book comes out….

Please check out the sidebar on page 2 of the story too, for a shortlist of some excellent books for anyone wanting to read more history, politics, literature, and musings about life in this crazy city, past and present (and a little Salmaland plug too). As always, thanks for reading!

Salmaland in Glamour’s New Cookbook

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 14:56:01 +0000

Glamour magazine’s new cookbook, 100 Recipes Every Woman Should Know, plugs Salmaland, and includes some recipes from yours truly. Check it out—the cookbook is just now hitting bookstores. Some months ago I was neck-deep in helping produce the cookbook, when Glamour hired me to co-write the book and work with a small crew of staff editors and writers to make it all happen. Was lots of fun, lots of hard work, and a fantastic team at Glamour. (Btw in case you were wondering why there was radio silence from me for a tiny stretch, that’s why.)

The recipes were compiled from many sources, including the Glamour recipe archives, plus contributions from the team of cookbook writers and editors, along with our food-obsessed friends around the U.S. and the world. Some of my favorites are the Indian-style potatoes (p.31), the spicy Michelada beer cocktails (p.72), the Tex-Mex migas (p.28), the classic Nicoise salade (p. 94), the awesomely buttery rib-eye (p. 105), the eggplant parmesan (p. 184), the glazed nuts (p.55), and the affogato sundae (p. 235), and many more. We tested the recipes like crazy for months on end, so you can pull them off with ease and success, even if you’re not the most frequent cook in the world. Enjoy!

Salmaland in Travel + Leisure

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 20:26:53 +0000

If I had to make a list of desert-island foods, chicken-fried steak would be way up there. Since it’s incredibly hard to find great chicken-fried steak outside Texas (and a few choice places in the South), I’m not sure how I’d ever find a decent chicken-fried steak on a desert island. But I’ll worry about that when the time comes. For now, check out this TravelandLeisure.com article, where I talk about my comfort food, including…yes, chicken-fried steak.

Follow me on Twitter

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 20:24:37 +0000

For restaurant tips, Salmaland updates, and miscellaneous food/drink musings, follow me at… @salmaland

Beirut Bits (and Bites)

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 08:02:56 +0000

In case I haven’t mentioned it here before (I guess I have, once or twice), I’m in Beirut at the moment working on a book. Throughout the coming months, I’ll also be blogging about my Beirut food adventures here on Salmaland: Click the BEIRUT 2010-2011 link at the top of this page to see what I’m eating and drinking around the city and in villages all over Lebanon. Now that we have things like Video Skype (the ultimate retro-futurist fantasy finally realized), you’d think there would be a way to pass the smoky babaghanoush, the crunchy fried fish drizzled with lemon, the minty fattoush salad, and the chargrilled, garlicky chicken kababs directly through the computer screen straight to you. Alas, not yet; in a couple of years maybe. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to simulate that killer app of the future. Sah’tain! (“Bon Appetit,” in Lebanese Arabic.)

NYC: Best or Worst Restaurant Town?

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:37:54 +0000

R.I.P. Beppe

Since I’m about to sublet my apartment until next summer, I’ve been doing a ruthless decluttering, throwing out pretty much everything or giving it away. Tossing things out, ripping them up, hurling them into trash bins: It’s fantastic therapy. Highly recommended. As I wade through closetfuls of junk, I’ve been making a few observations, like my tendency to collect Best-of-NYC restaurant issues—annual tomes put out by New York Magazine, Time Out NY (my alma mater), et al. I rarely refer back to the issues, but somehow they still pile up year after year.

New York Mag’s Where to Eat 2004 issue caught my eye, and I scanned the restaurant Hot List from that year. Whoa—dozens of the so-called “Hot List” restaurants from ’04 don’t even exist anymore. Felt like I was walking through a graveyard. I counted up the corpses: 40 restaurants on that Hot List—that’s more than a third of the 115 places listed—are now closed. Dead, gone. What does this all mean?

We know New York City can be a brutally harsh place for dreamy entrepreneurs. We know the recession is decimating the city’s restaurants, or at least editing them way down so that only the Darwinian superstars survive. But damn, either New York Mag’s Hot List was horrendously off-base six years ago, or the ongoing restaurant bloodbath citywide is even grimmer than it seems.

Still, I’m hoping (betting?) that the restaurants here on Salmaland have long-term chops. Many have already been around for years or decades, and some are admittedly the new/hot thing—but most of them, in my humble opinion, are more than just passing fancies. Am I willing to put money on that? Ask me in a few years…

A quick post-mortem:

These are the dead restaurants I mourn most on NY Mag’s Hot List: Beppe (terrific Italian from Cesare Casella—now of Salumeria Rosi—in a neighborhood that needed it) and La Caravelle (beautifully executed haute-French food in a charmingly mural-covered dining room, one of the last and best restaurants of a now-gone genre).

And these are the dead restaurants that were obviously doomed from the second they opened: Mix (a short-lived, ill-conceived Alain Ducasse casual-French project), 66 (a short-lived, ill-conceived Jean-Georges Vongerichten dim sum project), Ida Mae Kitchen ‘N Lounge (flimsily executed soul food), and Pearson’s Texas BBQ in Queens—because you can’t really do true Texas BBQ in New York; at least, as an ex-Texan, I’ve yet to find it, although Hill Country does come pretty close.

Here’s to a new decade of better, bolder, fiercer, fitter restaurants in NYC, the best (ok, arguably the best) food city in the world.