Savor Scout › Food guides › Yemeni food
How to find good Yemeni food
Yemeni restaurants and coffee houses have spread quickly across the US, and the food — slow-roasted meat on spiced rice, bubbling stews in stone bowls, enormous flatbreads — is some of the best value in any city that has it.
What separates a good one from a bad one
- Mandi with tender meat — Lamb or chicken slow-roasted and served on fragrant rice. The meat should fall from the bone.
- Saltah or fahsa bubbling in a stone pot — Stews topped with a frothy fenugreek foam (hulba), served boiling. Eaten with bread torn by hand.
- Fresh, huge flatbread — Malawah and khubz baked in a tandoor, often big enough to share.
- Zhug — Green chilli and herb sauce on every table.
- Yemeni coffee and tea — Spiced coffee with cardamom and ginger, and milk tea. The coffee houses are a cultural institution.
What to order
- Lamb mandi — The essential.
- Fahsa — Shredded lamb stew in a stone pot.
- Saltah — With bread.
- Fattah — Bread soaked in broth with honey or meat.
- Honey cake (bint al sahn) — Layered flaky bread with honey and black seed.
How Savor Scout looks for it
The search reads for mandi, fahsa, saltah and Yemeni, and also for Yemeni coffee, so it can tell a full kitchen from a coffee house and give you the one you asked for.
Looking in a particular city?
Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.
- New York, NY
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- Phoenix, AZ
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- Corpus Christi, TX
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