Order dolma at Iraqi House, and you submit, happily, to chance. What arrives might be whole onions or green bell peppers, or eggplant, or tomatoes, their insides emptied to make way for a meld of ground lamb and basmati rice, tinged by tomato, with vivid threads of parsley and dill running through.
Here, too, will likely be grape leaves as big as your palm, blanched and rolled round the same lamb and rice, making plump stubs like half-smoked cigars. The leaves are fairly constant, the other vegetables more unpredictable.
“Every dish is different,” said Mohammed Almandalawi, who opened the restaurant in July. “It depends on the luck of the person.”
Mr. Almandalawi was born in Mississippi, the son of Iraqi immigrants who decided to return to Baghdad after the first Persian Gulf war and later settled in Qatar. A former competitive swimmer, he moved to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, last fall and staked a claim on this plain-spoken storefront, recently vacated by a rotisserie chicken joint, with Chinese chow fun to one side and tacos and margaritas to the other.
He has taken on a singular responsibility: This may be the only restaurant in the city expressly devoted to Iraqi cuisine. La Kabbr, in Hell’s Kitchen, once regaled diners with platters of lamb and the kind of fresh-pressed juices for which Baghdad was renowned before the war, along with hookahs and live musicians on santur (a struck zither), but it closed a decade ago.
And there would be no Iraqi House without Mr. Almandalawi. He is not just the owner but chef, host, waiter and, thus far, the restaurant’s lone employee. After he takes your order, he disappears. Soon the scent of lamb fills the barely adorned dining room, stealing out of the hidden kitchen, musky and urgent.
Lamb is beloved here, present in almost every dish. Poached, it leaves its brooding ghost in a rich broth reserved and used for bamia — a faintly sour stew of tomatoes and okra gone pliant, with great teardrops of garlic cloves bobbing at the surface and meant to be eaten whole — and fosoulia, white kidney beans simmered and served with hunks of lamb still on the bone.
The grandest presentation of lamb is quzi — ribs, neck, shoulder or shank braised patiently over a long fade of time, then laid over rice cooked in ghee and suffused with bahar asfar, a golden spice blend that has kinship to Indian curry, with layers of cardamom, allspice and cloves.
The meat is a show of power, but it’s the rice that thrills, strewn with raisins gone fat, slivered almonds, bright pops of green peas and vermicelli broken down into little kinks and fried hard. You lose nothing if you order the rice with the excellent chicken instead, poached with bay leaves and cloves and pan-fried for a crisp veneer right before serving.
Still, my favorite dish was humbler: a simple sauté of onions and lamb minced coarsely, so it’s still juicy, with eggs cracked over it and the yolks pricked, making a mottle of yellow and white. Called makhlama, it has a recipe that goes back to medieval Arabic cookbooks, according to the Iraqi food writer Nawal Nasrallah. It’s traditionally breakfast, but brings renewed life to any hour.
Among the smaller plates, ground lamb is sealed inside sheer won-ton-like skins and deep-fried into skinny tubes like spring rolls, crackling nicely. Kubba differs from the kibbe found elsewhere in the Middle East: Instead of shaping the shells out of a paste of meat and bulgur wheat, Mr. Almandalawi kneads cooked rice into a lighter dough, then tucks in ground lamb and fries it bronze.
Iraqi House is small, but still too big for one person to run it alone. Come early, and you will dine well; come late, and you may go hungry. On a recent Saturday night, everything was sold out by 7:30, including dolma, which is so labor-intensive, Mr. Almandalawi can offer it only on weekends or by special order.
Nor does he have the time or equipment to bake samoon, a loaf with tapering ends that suggests a half-shut eye, best out of a stone oven so it’s crusty but yielding within. For now, there is only ordinary pita.
“I know how to cook a lot of things,” Mr. Almandalawi said. “This is just the beginning.”
By Ligaya Mishan
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