Iraqi Cuisine

[Kibbee Nayee]

I'm racking my brains trying to come up with another Iraqi restaurant in the area, and Sinbad is the only one I can think of. They serve samoon with meals which I don't think anyone else does (I suspect it's packaged, but you can always pretend).

You won't be disappointed (at least not too much) by Tigris Grill in Oakton.

Some of the menu at Granada is also Iraqi. (Warning - charming background music on this Web site.)

[DonRocks]

Some of the menu at Granada is also Iraqi. (Warning - charming background music on this Web site.)

It actually kind of reminds me of "Lick My Love Pump."

[ol_ironstomach]

It actually kind of reminds me of "Lick My Love Pump."

Could be weirder.  I was at the Detroit Auto Show last weekend, and could swear that Nissan's choice of background music was the talent show number from _Revenge of the Nerds_.

[Joshua Grinnell]

When my wife and I lived in Bangkok, we often staggered out of burger joints and BBQ places shaking our heads, thinking "ah, if only we could give these people the real thing, the REAL AMERICAN cuisine" but then we realized that sourcing the ingredients and building the smoking pits and convincing people, a la Hellburger, that some burgers are better a little less thoroughly cooked...

Long way of saying, I'm still waiting for an Iraqi place to have the balls to put masgouf on the menu:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masgouf

"But... it doesn't have the fire altar! Or the apricot logs! This is NOT masgouf!" etc. etc.

[Joshua Grinnell]

Also, trying really hard to lay politics aside -- for all the things that the Vietnam War did, at least it very slowly created an opening in the US for Vietnamese food. Will we see that for Iraqi and Afghan food in a decade?

Possibly not; one, in both deployment and on R&R, my understanding is that Americans were getting Halliburton/Bechtel DFAC food, with the only deviations from basic Army mac and cheese being what the Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Filipino contractors could sneak on the menu. I saw chicken adobo on the menu suspiciously often, for example. But did US soldiers in Vietnam come back with a taste for Thai and Vietnamese?

Second, (and again, no politics on a food board) there's not the sizable wave of refugees to both start and sustain the restaurants. But even that's not a given- I've been told by midwesterners that there aren't really Hmong restaurants despite having a locus of refugees.

Again, not looking for an American Sniper-esque flame war, just looking at some historical parallels. Especially not in a thread with a lighthearted link to Lick My Love Pump.