A Palestinian Restaurant Tests New York’s Tolerance

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- One of my favorite restaurants in New York City is about to open a branch two blocks from my home. This should be doubly exciting for me since my neighborhood, Yorkville, in the far Upper East Side, is something of a black hole in the city’s restaurant scene.

But the imminent arrival of Al Badawi, a high-quality Palestinian eatery on the corner of 89th Street and 2nd Avenue, fills me with a sense of foreboding. Its owners, chef Ayat Masoud and her husband Abdul Elenani, who own several other Palestinian restaurants, find themselves embroiled in the poisonous dispute that has broken out in New York, and across the US, over the Israel-Hamas war.

Most media attention is devoted to how the confrontation between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian activists is playing out in the public square and university campus — and to how big business is struggling to cope. But for the likes of Masoud and Elenani, the challenge is existential.

Their eateries, where Jews and Arabs have long dined together, are under a peculiar form of attack: a barrage of bad reviews on online platforms designed to drag down the restaurants’ ratings and drive away potential new customers. Think of it as cancel culture coming for cuisine.

The couple is proud of Masoud’s Palestinian heritage. Their restaurants, departing from the norm, advertise themselves as Palestinian; many others play it safe by identifying as “Middle Eastern” or “Levantine.” And their dishes have won plaudits for authenticity as much as for quality. Earlier this year, the New York Times listed the couple’s first eatery, Ayat, named after Masoud, as one of the city’s 100 best restaurants.      

When I mentioned Al Badawi in a column almost exactly a year ago, it was as an example of how food can unite people from nations with a long history of bitter enmity. I had taken an Iranian, a Saudi and an Emirati to lunch at the Brooklyn branch, and were gorged ourselves on Masoud’s superb execution of , hunks of lamb stewed in fermented ewe’s milk yogurt.

But in the current angry climate, I worry that her culinary skills will count for less than her identity. The timing is especially inopportune: A week after Hamas’ terrorist attack in southern Israel, the couple opened their first restaurant in Manhattan, a branch of Ayat near the East Village. Last week, they welcomed their first child. And now they are racing to open in my neighborhood.

The couple have endured an attack of bad online reviews before, during the last Israel-Hamas clashes in early 2021. But back then, they could count on loyal customers to rely on their own experiences at the restaurants and ignore the plunge in ratings. Now, with the new locations, Masoud and Elenani are especially vulnerable.  

The stakes of opening a new restaurant in Manhattan, never mind two, are high enough in the best of times; the attacks only worsen the odds. “New places need good reviews, and lots of them, to attract people who have never tried them,” Elenani tells me. After the couple raised alarms, platforms like Google have taken down some reviews, good as well as bad, and frozen the Ayat and Al Badawi pages. “But if you see this new place in your neighborhood only has a handful of reviews, and no new ones, you’re bound to wonder if it’s any good,” Elenani says.

Left with little other choice, he says he may have to promote the new restaurant “personally, from door to door.” In normal times, I would be able to assure him of an enthusiastic welcome in my neighborhood.  

But this is not a normal time. One recent morning, Elenani found two posters on the outside wall of the Yorkville place featuring photographs of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas on Oct 7. These have been popping up all over the world and have become controversial, where pro-Palestinian activists have torn them down.

The posters have not gone up on walls anywhere else in the neighborhood; there are none outside an Israel-owned café one block away. This suggests whoever put them up on the corner of 89th and 2nd was deliberately targeting a Palestinian establishment. To what end?

If they were meant as bait, Elenani was determined not to take it. He took a video of the posters on his phone, and left them on the wall. But the following day, someone had taken them down. This now leaves Elenani open to allegations of having removed them — which, in this highly charged moment, is all too easily equated to supporting Hamas.

When I mention the possibility to him, Elenani shrugs it off. He and Masoud are counting on New Yorkers’ sense of fairness as much as their appetite for gastronomic adventure. I hope we don’t let them down.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Bobby Ghosh is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering culture. Previously, he covered foreign affairs.

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