Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Food

Here Are Your Nominees For Best Middle Eastern Restaurant Of 2018!

Image by iStock

It’s that time of year again — it’s time for the Forward Food Awards, where we celebrate food as an essential part of Jewish life and ask you, our readers, to pick their favorite places to fress.

The nominees were chosen by Forward staff, but the choice of winners is entirely up to our readers.

The nominees for Best Middle Eastern Restaurant are:

Vish

NoHo’s never really been known for its kosher options – until now. Vish, whose tagline is VEGETARIAN. HUMMUS. HAPPINESS, offers a delicious, nourishing dream of healthy vegetarian hummus. Nothing like a vegetarian hummus bowl topped with sautéed mushrooms, fava beans, eggplant, vegan shwarma, hard boiled egg, falafel, and even shakshuka to fill your appetite.

DEZ

DEZ, short for dessert, offers an of-this-moment tightly focused menu that’s made for sharing. From the powerhouse behind By Chloe, DEZ offers beet and califlower mezzes, cardamom waffles and Moroccan lamb meatballs. Full of fresh, light, flavorful food, this dazzling Middle Eastern restaurant is a fantastic addition to a genre in need of a shakeup.

Kish Kash

Handmade couscous is the name of the game at Kish Kash. The menu is slim, no reservations accepted, befitted the casual dine-in nature of Middle Eastern cuisine. The lemon chicken tagine, slow-cooked lamb, fish in spicy tomato sauce, and spicy stewed vegetables will make you feel like you’ve traveled across the ocean.

Nur

Nur is a Middle Eastern restaurant that never stops reinventing itself. They offer a leisurely Mediterranean brunch, a constantly changing seasonal menu (currently offering scallop sashimi and Jaffa souvlaki), and an easy breezy environment that’ll set your mind at ease. It’s a modern palate with Jewish and Middle Eastern influence and its the perfect way to take a staycation in New York.

Miss Ada

Fort Greene’s newest Middle Eastern offering is not your average Middle Eastern food joint. It offers your classic Middle Eastern fare like hummus and baba ganoush, but with a twist. Think sweet-potato hummus and ginger aïoli-tinged baba ganoush. An Eastern European Jewish influence is also clearly detectable in dishes like the smoked herring. This unexpected menu is a refreshing, delectable, multi-faceted, endlessly creative delight.

Vote here!

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.

Exit mobile version