Mayrig Rating: 15/20 Pros: Good al-fresco area, nice interior decor, some excellent menu items, valet parking (15AED) Cons: slightly nonchalant service, some mediocrity on the menu, no shisha restrictions on the terrace (con for non-smokers), silly website with incorrect map Price: 100AED per person inc drinks
I heard about this place from scattered tongues – a friendly food blogger, and then a stranger-neighbour at a shared table, then a celebrity chef and a week later, a friend who had heard from a friend that they must try an Albanian restaurant on the Boulevard. Merik, she thought it was called. After much googling, despite the obstacle course of indications, I finally discovered Mayrig. An Armenian restaurant (no, not Albanian), that I found by searching for their lauded signature dish, the one everyone was telling me about – Fishnah kebab – barbecued lamb topped with sour cherries Mayrig is Armenian for ‘Mother’, and the restaurant’s ethos holds to this. Recipes are traditional home-kitchen ones, brought from Armenia to Beirut, affected by the local (Lebanese) culture over the years, then frozen in time when the family set up their first restaurant, below sandstone arcades in a house dedicated to Manouchag (who was actually grandmother, not mother) in the Bohemian quarter of Beirut. Hopefully Grandmother was entrepreneurial, because Mayrig has since franchised to Jeddah, Dubai (of course), and is soon to be in Riyadh and Bucharest. 80
The venue itself is about as homely as a villa in the shadow of the tallest building in the world could be. The exterior has that lovely rendered faux-old town look of (ahem) ‘Old Town’, and the Gulf two-level expansive villa feel that you’d expect to find in venues along Jumeirah beach rd. The floor is covered in exquisite tesselated tiles, the walls in cabinets that seem to be full of Mum’s best crystal, and there’s a valet-parking service out front, which might almost make you compare it to pulling into the driveway at a mate’s place. On that day, I didn’t have the cherry kebabs. It’s not my fault. No matter how I try and persuade my whitebread family to try something new, they are sticklers for their own tradition. The fact that they will happily eat shish tawook and stuffed vine leaves is purely accidental – they must have been too hungry to care at some point or another, and discovered that they actually enjoyed something they had previously thought weirdly exotic and filed under ‘untouchable’. And so, we ordered shish tawook and stuffed vine leaves. The stuffed vine leaves (Derevav Sarma) were accompanied by some slow cooked lamb chops with some
hefty-looking layers of fat. It’s fortunate they tasted better than they looked. The lamb was tender if meat a little sparse, but the great benefit of the combination was the gelatinous nuances infected upon the lightly sour sarma. Do I need to explain the shish tawook? In this city, I think not, suffice to say it was good. Roasted spuddies in preference to frozen chips was a nice surprise. Accompaniments of Armenian salad (too much cucumber) and mhammara (grainy but flavoursome) were reasonable but