Saudi Diaries — Part 5: A Culinary Awakening

I should have known what was coming. I had, after all, already eaten dinner with Abdulaziz. I had already heard him say, " This is nothing, wait until you see what comes next.” I had filed that away as the kind of thing a generous host says, a mild pleasantry, a gentle oversell.
I was not prepared. I want to be clear about that from the start. Nothing in my forty-plus years of breakfasting had prepared me for what was about to happen to that table.

​We walked into the restaurant mid-morning — one of those bright, unpretentious local places where the menu is written on a board above the counter and the smell of fresh bread hits you before you've cleared the doorway. Abdulaziz moved toward the cashier with the ease of a man who knew this territory his entire life, scanning the board briefly — not the way you read a menu when you are deciding, but the way a conductor glances at a score before a performance he has decided to give. Then he looked at me over his shoulder and said, with great warmth and absolutely no indication of what he was about to do: "Shall I order for us both?”
I said yes, of course. I neither spoke the language nor recognised more than a handful of items on the board. I was entirely in his hands once again, and I was glad to be there.

What happened next happened quickly and quietly. Abdulaziz spoke to the cashier in Arabic — a brief, flowing exchange that I stood beside with the comprehension of a particularly attentive houseplant. I caught nothing. I smiled. The cashier nodded. At some point during this exchange, with a smoothness I only understood in retrospect, a phone beeped, and Abdulaziz had also paid for the entire meal. I did not see a card produced. I did not see an amount stated. One moment we were ordering, and the next moment breakfast was simply happening, already taken care of, settled before I had the chance to reach for my wallet. It was the most elegant ambush I have ever experienced.
That was the moment I started learning about how many transactions in Saudi Arabia are made through digital and mobile payments, and how few are made in cash or even using  physical cards. I mean, of course, I had my cards in my phone's wallet, but coming from Austria, a country where they still (even today!) prefer cash over cards, I was not prepared.
Tfaddal, he said, gesturing toward our table. Let’s sit.
I did not yet know there would be enough food to fill a table twice the size of ours.

The first waiter arrived carrying bread.
Then another arrived. Then another.
I want to resist the urge to simply list what appeared, because a list does not do justice to the visual reality of what happened to that table in the space of about five minutes. What I remember is not individual dishes so much as the cumulative effect of them: the way the table's available surface began to shrink, platter by platter, bowl by bowl, basket by basket, until the table surface had almost entirely disappeared beneath an landscape of food that steamed and gleamed and smelled, collectively, of something so warm and deep and good that my stomach growled.
The colours alone were extraordinary. The deep brick red of one sauce against the pale cream of a dip. The glossy black of olives heaped in a small bowl. The vivid orange-red of something that glistened in the morning light. Steam rising from three separate platters simultaneously. This was not a breakfast. This was an argument, presented in food, that I had been thinking about breakfast incorrectly for my entire life.

Some of the breakfast dishes I had on this trip
​

The first wave came with bread — and bread, I quickly understood, is where everything begins.
Three kinds arrived, each different enough from the others to constitute its own conversation. Khubz Arabi first: the round, flat, puffed-up loaf that I recognised from home, but fresher here, warmer, softer — the kind that tears along its own natural fault lines and releases a small breath of steam when it opens. I tore a piece and felt it give between my hands with a satisfying, yielding softness that no bread from a plastic bag at my local supermarket has ever managed to replicate.
Then Tamees — larger, thinner at the edges and thicker at the centre, with a slight chew and a faint golden char from the oven that gave it a depth of flavour I was not expecting from something so simple. And Saj: stretched impossibly thin, almost translucent in places, draped over its basket like a cloth, tearing into delicate, paper-light sheets that dissolved on the tongue before you had quite finished chewing.
Around the bread came the dips and spreads, deployed not as an afterthought but as a full opening movement in their own right. Labneh — strained yoghurt, thick and cool, with a gentle, clean tang that cut through the warmth of the bread like something designed specifically for the purpose, which, in a sense, it was. Hummus so smooth it bore no resemblance to the grainy, faintly sad tub versions I had been, and still am, eating at home. Jibneh — white cheese, mild and slightly salty, crumbled at the edges. A bowl of zaytun, olives glistening in oil. And then muhammara: a roasted red pepper and walnut dip, slightly smoky, with a warmth that built slowly at the back of the throat — the dish I kept returning to when I thought no one was watching, and the one Abdulaziz noticed me returning to, because of course he did, because he notices everything.
I was already approximately two-thirds full at this point. The hot dishes had not yet arrived.

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​Now. Before I describe what arrived next, I need to address something that, over the course of this trip, became a recurring source of both education and personal humiliation: the bread.
In Saudi breakfast, bread is not a side dish. It is the utensil. You tear it, fold it, use it to scoop, to dip, to carry — it is fork and spoon and plate all at once, and when deployed correctly by someone who has grown up doing it, it is an elegant and efficient system. I watched my friend and the people around us do it with one hand, effortlessly, a natural extension of the meal's logic.
I am left-handed. I have been left-handed for my entire life and have made a certain peace with the minor inconveniences this brings in a right-handed world. But eating with your left hand at a traditional Arabic table is not quite the done thing — the right hand is the one you eat with, the one you offer food with, the one that does the social work of a shared meal. I knew this even before I arrived in the country; I understood it completely and switched hands immediately, with great confidence. Well… with some confidence.
What followed was less elegant than I had hoped.
The problem with using bread as a utensil when you are operating with your non-dominant hand is that bread, unlike a fork, requires a certain dexterity to control. It folds when you don't want it to fold. It tears at the wrong angle. It delivers its cargo — labneh, foul, shakshuka, whatever you were aiming for — with a trajectory that is, let us say, optimistic. I spent the first several minutes of that breakfast engaged in a series of small engineering challenges while trying to appear as though everything was under control. Abdulaziz watched this with the carefully neutral expression of a man trying very hard not to laugh.
I know he was trying not to laugh because, at a certain point, a piece of Tamees bread loaded with shakshuka made a bid for freedom and part of it found its way onto my shirt instead of my mouth. I looked down. I looked up. Abdulaziz looked up at the ceiling, deeply interested in something apparently happening up there.
Very good technique, he said eventually, in a tone of perfect sincerity.
Shukran, I said, with as much dignity as I could locate.
This was the first of what would become, over the course of the trip, a reliable series of shirt casualties. Jeddah, KAEC, Al Ula, Riyadh, Dammam — every significant meal left some kind of evidence on my clothing. By the end of the trip, I had developed a system: dark shirts for the days when I knew I would not have a chance to change my clothes. It did not always help. The bread always won.
But here is what I remember more than the stains: Abdulaziz never once made me feel anything other than completely at ease. He handed me bread, he refilled my plate, he pointed at dishes and said try this, try that — and when the bread misfired, he laughed with me, not at me, in the way that only people who actually like you are capable of doing. Being bad at something in front of someone who makes you feel entirely safe about being bad at it — that, I have come to think, is one of the better definitions of friendship.
​

​The second wave completely changed the temperature of the table.
Foul came first — twice, in two different preparations, which felt both generous and faintly challenging. The first version was the foul medames I had encountered at the hotel breakfast: earthy, slow-cooked fava beans with olive oil and lemon, simple and deeply satisfying in the way that food cooked low and long always is. The second was spiced differently, richer, smoother, with a complexity that made it taste like an entirely different dish made from the same ingredient. I ate from both bowls, tried to identify what was different but couldn't, decided it didn't matter, and kept eating. Found out later that the second bowl just had a healthy serving of tahina in it.
Shakshuka arrived in its pan, eggs poached directly in a vivid, spiced tomato sauce that was still bubbling faintly at the edges when it reached us. I broke a yolk with a piece of khobz and watched it bleed slowly into the red, and I thought, not for the first time that morning, I have been eating breakfast wrong.
And then came kibdah. Liver, spiced and pan-fried, slightly crisp at the edges, with a warmth that lingered.
I know: liver isn't something people here are looking for on a menu. I am Croatian living in Austria — I know, as most of us living here, Tafelspitz and Wiener Schnitzel, Goulash and Strudel and many other. Liver has always occupied a particular corner of my personal culinary map, which I usually prepare and eat with family or alone. Others are just not into it. I was excited to try it because Abdulaziz mentioned it a few times, saying how delicious it was.
He was right. I liked it very much. I added it to the list of things I have prepared so many times after that breakfast.
Sahtain, said Abdulaziz, watching me eat. To your health. Twice over.
Shukran, I said, which was the correct response and also, at that moment, the only Arabic word I could locate in my brain, which was increasingly occupied with the logistics of where all this food was going.
​

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​I believed, at this point, that we were finished.
I was wrong. Again!
Abdulaziz waved to the waiter, and a few seconds later, a bowl arrived. It looked, at first glance, like something… I don’t know… maybe sweet, maybe not — pale, creamy, with a golden colour that suggested dessert, but with grated cheddar cheese on top - so maybe not a dessert...
Try this, he said. Just try it.
Masoob. A traditional Saudi dish I have heard of and cannot adequately explain to someone who hasn't had it, except to say: imagine very ripe bananas, mashed and folded into warm cream, and shredded bread, the whole thing dense and sweet and soft, served warm. And then — here is where it becomes extraordinary — grated cheddar cheese over the top.
I looked at it. I looked at Abdulaziz. He was watching me with great interest.
I tried it. (Oh! Btw! this one is eaten with a spoon!) :-D
The combination should not work. Banana. Warm cream. Cheddar. On paper, this is chaos. In the bowl, it is something close to revelation — the sweetness of the banana softened by the cream, the slight saltiness of the cheese running through it, the whole thing warm and smooth and unlike anything in my existing vocabulary for food. I spent a few seconds trying to file it somewhere and gave up and simply enjoyed it instead.
Abdulaziz said nothing. He didn't need to. His expression said: I knew you’d like it!
Bel3afia, was the only thing he said.
Allah y3afeek. - and this time I even knew how to reply properly!
He laughed and pushed the bowl slightly closer to me.

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We sat for a long time after the eating had stopped.
This, I came to understand, is also part of the meal. The unhurried sitting. The conversation that moves slowly from topic to topic with no particular agenda. At home  — breakfast is a logistical event. It happens in the window between waking up and sitting down at the office desk. It is fuel. It is functional. You eat, you drink your coffee, you start working.
This was not that. This was the opposite of that. This was breakfast as a complete act in itself, requiring nothing before it and rushing toward nothing after. The meal had not been a prelude to the day. It had been the day's purpose for this particular pocket of hours, and everything else would arrange itself around it.
Tea arrived in small glasses — dark amber, fragrant, with a few leaves of habaq floating in it. Fresh mint, but not quite the mint I knew from home: sweeter, softer, with a floral note underneath the familiar coolness. I held the glass in my right hand and breathed it in before I drank it.
It tasted like something settling. Like the moment after you have put down something heavy you had been carrying without realising it.
I sat back in my chair, genuinely unable to move, and looked at the table — still half-covered in the wreckage of an abundance I had not been prepared for — and I thought: this is not how Abdulaziz feeds a guest. This is how he says something. This whole meal, from the first basket of bread to the bowl of masoob produced at the very end from the kitchen, was a sentence in a language I was only just beginning to learn. It was care, made edible. Warmth, made into something you could hold and taste and remember.
Shukran, I said again, quietly, meaning it in a way that the word felt slightly too small for.
He waved his hand — the gesture that means, in any language: it is nothing, don't mention it. Which, of course, was the most Saudi response possible. The grandest gesture, followed immediately by its own dismissal.

In Saudi, I have never eaten a grab-and-go breakfast since. Not really. Not in the way I used to — standing at the kitchen counter at home or in the elevator at work with a piece of bread and a slice of cheese, already thinking about something else, the meal barely registering as an event. Now, on the mornings when I have time, I find myself at the stove. A small pot of foul, or eggs in tomato sauce. A bowl of labneh with olive oil and some olives. Warm bread if I can manage it. It never quite reaches what that table in Jeddah looked like. It is not supposed to. It is just my way of returning, for twenty minutes on a Sunday morning, to a meal that taught me what Saudi breakfast can be.
That morning with Abdulaziz changed something in me that I did not notice changing until much later, when I looked back and realised the before and after were clearly visible, separated by a bowl of masoob and a glass of “shai habaq” in the morning light of the Jeddah Corniche.