Three by Eva Dubai

Some days you pick a restaurant and some days the news picks it for you.

Three by Eva is a Jordanian restaurant. The food of Jordan and Palestine shares ingredients, dishes, histories and family tables that don’t always fit neatly within borders.

Tonight, with Palestine on my mind, this was where I wanted to eat.

We had an amazing Fattet Shishbarak – little dumplings resting on warm yogurt, with grilled lamb, pine nuts and chili oil. Thinking about it, Shish barak makes no commercial sense. Little fiddly dumplings with too many folds, too little margin, yet here it is.

Some dishes survive because someone decides they’re too precious to lose. Preservation, it turns out, requires a little stubbornness.

Eva learnt to cook from her mother and grandmother; today, her daughter Emilie leads the kitchen. Recipes move through this family from one generation to the next. Restaurants are peculiar repositories of memory. Recipes are passed down, names retained, techniques repeated.

Perhaps that’s why food matters so much when other things are being lost. Memory is a counterforce to erasure.

And the menu itself is editorial in nature. Carefully chosen. When we ordered the Fattet, our waiter was delighted for us. It’s a new dish on our menu, he proudly announced, validating our choice. Menus are full of decisions about what deserves to stay and what can disappear.

Don’t order something for long enough and eventually it gets replaced. Leave something undefended for long enough and eventually people stop asking where it went. Silence has a cost. Silence, after all, is a position.

But the star of the meal was the humble bread – the Jerusalem (Quds) Ka’keh, a warm loop of bread covered in sesame. There is something important about calling things by their proper names. A name carries meaning and history. It tells you where something came from and asks you, however briefly, to acknowledge it.

Some truths become harder to ignore once somebody finally calls them by their name.

I don’t imagine Eva, Emilie or Lillian intended their dinner to carry so much meaning for me tonight. But that’s the amazing thing about restaurants, isn’t it? Less