The menu at Maqluba, a comfortable, casual restaurant that opened about a year ago on Third Avenue in Bay Ridge, is lengthy, varied, and ridiculously appealing. It's got Middle Eastern mainstays such as shawarmas, falafel, and all the familiar dips mingling with the likes of warak enab, or Lebanese grape leaves, and zahir be laban, a Palestinian stew of bone-in lamb and yogurt. You could eat here happily every night for a month, solo or with a crew, and not exhaust the possibilities.
That said, if you can get a few friends to join you, you should make Maqluba's namesake dish a priority.
Chef Fatme, who hails from Lebanon, calls it Palestine's second most favorite dish (number one, she says, is mansaf, which she also serves here), and it's a beauty: a massive mound of rice, redolent with her special blend of seven spices—clove, curry, cinnamon, cumin, other secret things—as well as carrots, potato, cauliflower, eggplant and, if you want, large amounts of chicken, lamb, or shrimp.
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