Nader Hatem and Sammer Essi remember when fellow students at Syracuse’s Ed Smith Elementary School would poke a little fun at what they brought for lunch.
“We used to go to school with pita bread sandwiches and kids would look at us like, ‘What are you eating?” Hatem recalled of those 1970s-era school days. “They all seemed to have peanut butter and jelly.”
“I had za’atar (a finely chopped herb spread) and cucumbers from home,” Essi said, noting that the appearance of za’atar could resemble “crushed ants.” “And they (the other kids) would be like, ‘You’re eating bugs?’ "
Something similar, but a little more grown up, was happening for the adults in their families.
The Hatems started the first King David’s Restaurant on Marshall Street near Syracuse University in 1974, while the Essis launched Munjed’s Restaurant on Westcott Street in 1984. The Tadros family, relatives of the Hatems, also ran a downtown Syracuse restaurant, the Jerusalem, in the 1980s.
They were among the first restaurants serving Middle Eastern cuisine in Central New York.
“Back then, many people here had never heard of falafel, or hummus, or shawarma,” said Ronda Tadros Akl, a cousin of Nader Hatem and his family. “It was something new, something people in Syracuse hadn’t seen.”
This year, King David’s celebrates 50 years in business (with current locations in Fayetteville and Fairmount). Munjed’s is marking 40 years as an anchor on Westcott Street. And the cuisine they pioneered locally is more popular than ever in Central New York.
Eateries like Byblos Mediterranean Cafe, Baghdad Restaurant, Pita Dream, Mediterranean Combo / The Kabob House, Syracuse Halal Gyro, Diwan and others have opened across the region. They offer Middle Eastern / Mediterranean specialties like gyros, kabobs, kofta, tabbouleh and more.
“These families (the Hatems, the Essis, the Tadroses and their relatives) did all the work, all the heavy lifting, that made it possible for what is happening today,” Akl said. “And they’re still around to be part of it.”
A 1940s clipping from the Post-Standard shows ladies of St. Elias Orthodox Church making food for their annual festival.SYR
The roots of Middle Eastern culture in Central New York date back to the 1920s, when the first wave of immigration from Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan arrived in Syracuse.
Many of those immigrants were Orthodox Christians. Some of the families founded St. Elias Antiochian Orthodox Church, which began on West Lafayette Avenue in the city in the 1920s and moved to a spot on Onondaga Hill in 1968.
The church’s Middle Eastern Festival celebrates its 95th anniversary this year from July 11 to 14 at the church grounds, 4988 Onondaga Road (Route 173). The festival, like King David’s and Munjed’s restaurants, has been essential over the years in promoting Middle Eastern foods in the Syracuse area.
“Years and years ago people would come to the festival and have our food, our tabbouleh, and spinach pies and kibbeh and those things,” said Hilda Khammar. “And all the sweet things, like baklawa.”
Cooks work the grill at the St. Elias Middle Eastern Festival, 4988 Onondaga Rd., Syracuse, July 11, 2019.Michael Greenlar | mgreenlar@syr
Her grandmother, Hilda Kammar, emigrated from Acre in Palestine and was among the ladies who prepared food in the early days of the St. Elias festival. “Many people didn’t know how to make those things, people who weren’t from the Middle East. So they started classes to teach them and it became very popular.”
Khammar, who once ran the St. Elias festival, has mementos and Post-Standard newspaper clippings of those early days, including a picture of her grandmother grinding lamb for kibbeh at the fest in 1942. The headline reads “Spices Lend Their Enchantment to Syrian Dishes As Syracuse Women Reveal Culinary Secrets.”
Meanwhile, Middle Eastern immigration continued. The families that included the Hatems, the Essis and the Tadroses arrived in the 1950s and 1960s. Members of those families came from places like Jerusalem, Lebanon and Jordan.
“Why Syracuse? That is always the question,” Akl said. “It was because of the community that was already here. Our families were like the second wave.”
The Hatem, Essi and Tadros families all ended up living near each other in the University neighborhood, in the vicinity of Euclid and Ackerman avenues. The kids in the families attended Ed Smith Elementary, Levy Middle and Nottingham High schools.
“It really was a beautiful time because we all knew there was trouble going on over there in the Middle East, but here it was very normal,” Akl said. “And Syracuse was a very welcoming place.”
The families spoke Arabic at home and kept up other traditions, such as hunting for grape leaves used in dishes like stuffed grape leaves, called warak diwali in Arabic and dolmades in Greek.
“I remember sitting on our front porch on Euclid and my grandmother would be out with her basket picking grape leaves from throughout the neighborhood so we would have them for the winter,” Akl said. Soon members of the other families would join. “It was a communal thing that we all did.”
Before they came to America, the Hatems had run food stores in Lebanon. Others, like the Tadros family, ran such shops in Syracuse.
The farro bowl with chicken at King David's restaurant in Fairmount.Charlie Miller | [email protected]
By the early 1970s, Nader Hatem’s parents, Milad and Angela, decided they would open a restaurant.
“My parents enjoyed cooking and so they thought it would be great to share our food with the community,” Hatem said. “And that’s how they opened King David’s.”
The early King David’s menu leaned heavily on Lebanese cuisine. Hatem said, but came to embrace the foods that were common to the Middle East and Mediterranean region.
“There is a lot of similarity across the Middle East, with some minor differences here or there,” Hatem said.
“Over there, the differences are more noticeable than they are here,” Akl said. “The falafel is different from one place to another, but here it seems very similar. It’s like barbecue in the U.S. We know there are differences, but it’s not so obvious for people coming here.”
Success came to King David’s, driven in large part by a growing taste for vegetarian cooking in the ‘70s Hatem said. Many Middle Eastern items, like the falafel made from chickpeas and the spinach pies, are vegetarian.
“The vegetarian crowd coming, that was really great for us,” Hatem said. Still, it was an acquired taste for many people.
Around 1981, Akl’s parents, Jalil and Afifeh Tadros, opened the Jerusalem Restaurant on Water Street downtown. Afifeh Tadros was the sister of Angela Hatem.
The Jerusalem lasted only a few years, hurt in part because downtown Syracuse was not seen as a dining out destination at the time, Akl said. But it helped get the word out about Middle Eastern cuisine. Afifeh Tadros also had a Middle Eastern food stand called the Oasis at the New York State Fair.
“It took a lot of time for people to be comfortable with it (Middle Eastern food)‚” Akl said. “It took a lot of convincing. It wasn’t like the Italian restaurants where you knew exactly what to expect. You had to be a little brave.”
“My mom was very proud to share her love of the food,” Akl said. “If it (Jerusalem) opened now, I know it would be more successful.”
Chicken shawarma from Munjed's on Westcott Street. (Alicia Cuadrado | Contributing Writer)
Then, in 1984, the Essi family joined in. Munjed’s opened on Westcott Street, in a location next to the Westcott Theater. It relocated to the other side of the street, in the former Orange Grove location, in 2014.
Munjed’s is named for Sammer Essi’s uncle, Munjed Essi, who co-founded it with his sister, Majida Essi-Kiefer. Munjed’s mother, and Sammer’s grandmother, Nadia Essi, played a major role in developing it.
Like the younger members in all the families, Sammer Essi went to work at the family business while still in school.
“In 1984, the falafel sandwich was $1.57,” Essi said. “That I remember. Those were the days.”
In later years, hype over the “Mediterranean diet,” deemed as healthful, helped both King David’s and Munjed’s.
“Everyone thought our food was good for them,” Hatem said. “And that was good for us.”
King David’s even changed its slogan: “It was ‘The Best in Middle Eastern Food’ and then we switched to “Fresh Mediterranean Cuisine,’ " Hatem said.
Over the years, King David’s and Munjed’s both started adding more Greek items to their menus. It started with gyros.
“Gyros are definitely Greek,” Essi said. “So many of the other things are both Greek and Middle Eastern, but not gyros. But that’s what people were asking for. So then we had people asking for something else Greek, whether it was moussaka or pastichio or spanakopita. We decided to diversify our menu by adding the Greek section.”
The popularity of gyros came with another change, Hatem said. “We always called them ‘yeer-oss,’ " he said. “But after a while, we gave up. It’s ‘jeye-rohs’ now.”
Even though the original King David’s and Munjed’s were serving the same kind of food, and in essentially the same part of town, they did not view each other as competitors.
“People don’t realize how good friends we all are,” Hatem said. “So it’s not competition. We were all friends growing up. We wanted what was good for the food.”
“You don’t compete with your friends,” Essi agreed. “We always helped each other out, and still do.”
Now, throughout Central New York, the numbers of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean restaurants are on the rise. That follows a more recent wave of immigration, from places like Iraq and even North Africa.
“There’s a bigger community here now, a greater number from that part of the world,” Akl said. “And they want to eat out too. So I think all these new places are also serving a bit of a different audience.”
Lamb and beef gyro from Pita Dream in Armory Square, one of the newer Middle Eastern restaurants in Syracuse. (Jared Paventi | [email protected])Jared Paventi | jaredpaventi@gma
It’s possible there could be a risk of too many Middle Eastern places, Hatem said, especially because it’s a tough time to run a restaurant in general. But for now, he added, “It seems like it’s still getting more popular. So I guess that means it’s a good thing there are more places.”
At age 86, Hilda Khammar said she’s delighted to see the rising popularity of the foods she grew up with and helped promote at the St. Elias festival.
“I’m so proud that it’s so popular and that people like it,” she said. “My grandmother would be amazed and very happy.”
Don Cazentre writes for NYup.com, syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. Reach him at [email protected], or follow him at NYup.com, on Twitter or Facebook.