Delicious diversity from the Middle East
Passionate cook: Sarvat
Sarvat Baluch Naqqash and Naqqash Jaleel were a match made in foodie heaven. They love to cook and eat together, and both had dreamed of going into the food industry before they had ever met. Born and brought up in Saudi Arabia and having lived much of her life in the Middle East, Sarvat met Naqqash when he came to the Middle East on work. Now, seven years down the line, they have two children and a restaurant to call their own.
Arabian Knights started as a small outlet on Marine Drive but the popularity of their shawarmas gave Sarvat and Naqqash the confidence to scale up and hope that an extended menu of their favourite Middle Eastern foods would find favour with Colombo’s diners. Their new restaurant on Galle Road, Kollupitiya has only been open a few weeks but is already full with customers. It helps they keep odd hours here, opening for lunch and staying open all the way through to dinner. When you factor in catering and deliveries, they’re kept on their toes.
Sarvat’s confidence doesn’t seem to have wavered in the face of demands from her new business. She’s here managing the day to day operations while Naqqash oversees their finances and marketing from Doha where he works as the operations director at Amadeus. It helps that she knows the food intimately, and has test run the menu herself many times. It’s filled with dishes both classic and reinterpreted that she thinks represent Arabic cooking in all its delicious diversity.
Allow Sarvat to order for you and you’ll be introduced to some of her favourite dishes on the menu. She starts us off with the house’s signature mocktails – the Polo and Mint (Rs.320) and Camel’s Fury (Rs.390). Fresh, cold and sweet, they’re tasty, if filling. When it comes to the food, Sarvat believes its best devoured as a kind of buffet with multiple dishes and pita bread to wipe it all up. (The latter is baked fresh in house and is as soft and delicious as you could hope for.)
If you’re feeling brave enough, she’ll try to tempt you into eating one of her personal favourites, the chicken liver cooked in pomegranate sauce (Rs.580). Despite any qualms you may have rest assured that there are few things in this world pomegranate sauce could not improve. Sweet and tangy, this dark, rich sauce is magic in a bottle. Sarvat says she and Naqqash have long been fans of it – always carrying bottles of it up and down for their family table. (In fact, even now Arabian Knights must import many of their ingredients from Doha. Whatever they can make though, they make from scratch – and that includes the ketchup.)
Broken wheat (another import) goes into the fresh, piquant salad of tabbouleh (Rs.430) made with parsley, mint, onions and tomatoes and finished with lime and when you combine that with the house hummus (Rs.360) and a generous bowl of a crisp, green fattoush salad (Rs. 360), it’s a simple, deliciously reliable combination that works every time.
There is no shortage of other Middle Eastern classics on the menu – the harissa (Rs.290) in particular is a welcome sight. Sarvat makes hers spicy as you’d expect – blending smoky peppers with chilli, coriander, garlic and olive oil to create the fiery red dip. (They also serve tahini, baba ganoush and dakkous dips among others.) Some dishes, like the grilled haloumi (Rs.660) aren’t always available. Sarvat has some of the squeaky cheese to offer us tonight – this too is made from scratch in the kitchen where they use rennet to separate the milk and press the cheese overnight to get that unique texture.
There’s a lot of meat on this menu and it’s well-priced with the most expensive item, the mixed grill, coming in at Rs.780.Sarvat has the meat marinated for at least 24 hours but when it comes to her signature shawarmas the challenge isn’t so much in the marination, but in the stacking. Whole chickens are deboned and placed one on top of the other before being impaled on the shawarma grill. On weekends the restaurant goes through 15kgs in five hours, and it takes the dedicated attention of their in-house Syrian chef to keep it running. He uses two knives to slice away at the meat, and cutting it correctly is an art in itself. There’s more than one kind of shawarma available – Sarvat says the difference between the Dubai and the Syrian style boils down to the sauces used and whether or not salad is included into the roll.
To accompany all that meat coming off the grill, there’s a selection of rice and couscous dishes. Dishes like the kabsa and the chicken majboos represent distinct regional flavours, while credit for the smoky rice dishes needs to go to Sarvat, who created them for the restaurant.
Sarvat is proud of the food they serve, having poured so much of herself and her love of cooking into the menu. She says she’s often up late studying not just recipes but the origins of the dishes she’d like to serve. It’s still a work in progress – in her kitchen at home she’s trying to master the light filo pastry that will let them make baklava. Having studied fashion and jewellery design, Sarvat has also worked as a trainer which she says allows her to manage her staff of 25 with ease. Her fluent Arabic has come in useful more than once – but these days she uses it mostly to make her guests from the Middle East feel at home at Arabian Knights.
In the meantime, she’s also a mother to two young children. Her daughter is thrilled to have a dish on the menu – Haya’s Brownies – named after her and served just the way she likes it. The cupcake shaped brownie is covered in chocolate sauce and served with deep fried ice cream encased in a cake batter. Looking around, Sarvat admits that as a family, they’ve left their comfort zone far behind. They miss having Naqqash with them but the sacrifice has been needed to get the restaurant up and running. The two dream of the time when they can have a chain – with smaller express outlets serving other parts of the city. With the restaurant doing so well, it doesn’t seem too distant a dream. After only six months in Sri Lanka, Sarvat says she’s happy that the word has gotten out – “I feel nice when people know my restaurant and I love it when the say the food is fabulous. That makes my day.”