SOURCE: SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

BY: SOLEIL HO

Palestinian cuisine seems to be having a moment in the United States, with significant and forward-looking chefs like Reem Assil, Lamees Dahbour and Mona Leena Michael leading the way here; elsewhere, Sameh Wadi and Amanny Ahmad are holding it down in Minneapolis-St. Paul and New York City, respectively. The past two years also saw the release of several books on the subject: Yasmin Khan’s “Zaitoun”, Joudie Kalla’s “Baladi” and Reem Kassis’ “The Palestinian Table.”

This class of chefs is exciting, grappling with the politically complicated task of carving out space for their cuisine in a time when even mentioning Palestine as a homeland or country of origin is fraught —and rarely even permitted by the style guides of mainstream media.

So when I saw that Beit Rima, a quick-service restaurant in the Castro, was being conceived as a tribute to the owner’s Palestinian-Jordanian roots, I was intrigued to see where he would take this ongoing conversation.

This much is certain: Now feels like the perfect moment for such a restaurant to open. Spiritually speaking, Beit Rima is everyone’s kid brother, a youthful and energetic glimpse into Arab American life that can capitalize on the dining public’s more-than-passing familiarity with labneh and orange blossom water in a stylized version of an Arab hipster’s living room.

It took a year for Samir Mogannam to convince his father, Paul, to let him turn the Church Street BurgerMeister into an Arab restaurant. The elder Mogannam had been a local entrepreneur since the 1970s but had owned the BurgerMeister chain for the past 20 years, although by the time his son came of age, the number had dwindled to three locations. Rima, Samir Mogannam’s mother, was enthusiastically supportive, but his father wasn’t so sure. He was hesitant to hand over the keys to his son until he knew he was ready.

So for a year, the younger Mogannam bided his time, picking up shifts at Theorita and refining the concept that would eventually become Beit Rima, which means “Rima’s house” in Arabic.

“I really wanted to rep Arab food,” Mogannam told me over the phone while prepping for a weekday lunch service. For him, so much of Beit Rima’s appeal rested in the opportunity to sketch out what the identity means in a society that doesn’t see much positive representation of it. Thus, Beit Rima is all about “Arab comfort food” — he refused to use a less politically charged category like “Mediterranean” to describe the restaurant. (And please, Mogannam doesn’t want you to call his food “Arabian”: “It’s a horse, a peninsula, a fictional Disneyland idea,” he says.)

His father built a career on the all-American burger and fries. Mogannam wanted to swap those for Gaza-style braised lamb shank, muhammara and batata harra. It was risky; but in the end, the elder Mogannam relented and loaned him the money to open. The timing was finally right, too, when Lebanese, Palestinian, Moroccan, Yemeni and Israeli restaurants have such a strong foothold in the Bay Area. Indeed, Mogannam cites his experiences working at Aziza, Dyafa and the departed Tawla as major influences.

So Mogannam and an army of friends leaped into action, transforming the Castro space in a span of three months. The original BurgerMeister tables are still there, now accompanied by Ethan Allen chairs that Mogannam and interior designer Fadi Alnumaani picked up off Craigslist. A Saudi artist named Nasser, found via Instagram, provided pop art prints for the walls: technicolor collages of Albert Einstein in a Saudi shemagh and a Bedouin woman juxtaposed with classic song lyrics in Arabic. Winter squashes, overflow stock from the kitchen’s storage, are scattered around like conversation pieces above the banquette that lines one of the walls. The decor is youthful and fresh; Mogannam’s laser focus on building a showcase of contemporary Arab culture is readily apparent.

Was the neighborhood, let alone Mogannam himself, ready for an Arab restaurant?

It seems so, from the crowds that pack the restaurant every time I’ve visited. Like every other quick-service restaurant, the structure of Beit Rima is reassuringly familiar: Order at the register, take a number and wait. Seating can be tough to find at peak hours, so you’ll have to get comfortable with haunting the dining room and peeking at other parties’ plates to see which table might be opening up next. Sip some tea and lose your marbles watching someone else hover over a tablespoon of hummus for 15 minutes.

When it comes to the menu, Mogannam says he’s not trying, in his words, “to be creative.” That is, he doesn’t plan to invent anything new or blow anyone’s minds with deconstructed this-or-that. The menu features dishes from his childhood, recipes from his Jordanian and Palestinian heritage that any native of those places would recognize, all streamlined for high-volume output from a cramped kitchen space.

Next time you go to Beit Rima, peek over the kitchen partition while you’re waiting in line to really appreciate the tiny workhorse grill that produces all of those kebabs. While he doesn’t go as far as using pre-made canned products like many places that serve mezze-style dishes and dips, the ful ($8) eschews fresh fava beans for canned to save on labor and keep prices down. (The difference, in my experience, is negligible unless you plan to serve the whole beans as a garnish.)

And I agree — the food is not all that creative. Scan the menu and you’ll find crowd-pleasers like hummus ($9), kebab plates ($16) and shakshuka ($10) presented with expertise but without much adornment, although Mogannam’s enthusiasm leaks out through the liberal use of exclamation points: One section is titled “Things to dip with!” which certainly revs one up to get dipping. There is beauty to be found here in the mundane, in the way a six-minute egg splits open, its yolk mingling with bright red chile powder and minced green jalapeño, and in the exhalation of steam that escapes from the hand-kneaded flat bread ($5) that’s topped with za’atar and baked to order.

I found the fattoush ($8) utterly delicious — a smattering of charred dates added depth to the salad that fans of Tawla will find familiar. Other highlights include the hummus ma’lehma ($12) with cumin-spiced beef crumbled on top; beautiful morsels of falafel (79 cents each) made from dried chickpeas and crusted with sesame seeds; and a complex muhammara ($8), a mixture of roasted red peppers, nuts and pomegranate flavor that’s like Spanish romesco sauce with the bass turned way up.

Beit Rima is most effective when it channels the sensory pleasures of home; you feel like you’re reading a memoir that includes a scratch-and-sniff feature. This is “comfort food,” after all.

There are more explicit ties, too: Seedo’s shay ($2), a chamomile-anise tea, is named for his grandfather because it was his favorite blend. Both the hummus and ful come topped with Rima’s relish, a bright and welcome mixture of garlic and jalapeño macerated in lemon juice, and the kebab plates feature “mom’s rice,” made slightly rich from olive oil. On my visits, the latter ping-ponged between overdone and not quite done enough, which felt like a greater trespass because it’s mom’s, after all.

Mogannam said he plans to expand the dessert menu soon, which now includes just one option: muhalabia ($6), a milk pudding scented with orange blossom water and topped with pistachio and chewy drops of mastic. Dessert was my favorite part of my meals there, so that was good to hear.

The difficult part of the experience for me was the discord between the pace of the restaurant and the menu. With its big mezze portions and “Things to dip with!,” the menu made me want to take up space and laze around. The restaurant is popular — so popular that table space is precious enough for waiting parties to approach you to call dibs on your spot if they see your plates near-emptied. I wonder if the concept, now proven a crowd favorite, would work just as well with a reservation system, at least during peak hours.

I found the execution of service uneven as well, mainly in the realm of mistaken orders being delivered and then, when revealed, both the runner and I were puzzled about what to do about it. On one visit, my party was told we could order kebabs a la carte, but we received a whole plate instead. From a few overheard conversations from tables nearby, I got the sense that we weren’t alone in this.

Hopefully expansion will solve that first problem: Mogannam told me he’s already eyeing the remaining BurgerMeister locations in Cole Valley and Daly City now that he’s close to paying back his father’s loan, hoping to turn them into Beit Rimas as well.

To watch that slow transition is to catch an intimate glimpse into how the American palate can shift over time, opening up new spaces for work that delves with greater depth into the diversity of the human condition. Samir Mogannam’s father, the businessman, did what he felt he had to do to survive here, and the work he did paved the way for his son to share, with full honesty and little compromise, the flavors he grew up savoring.

And even before that, Samir’s paternal and maternal grandparents made their living as convenience-store owners here (coincidentally both called “Richmond Market”). The narrative arc of his family reminds me of advice I heard back in college from a philosophy professor: “Your grandparents were farmers, so that your parents could be doctors and businesspeople, so that you could be an artist.”

At Beit Rima, you can see the artist standing on the shoulders of his ancestors, and it’s a dazzling sight to see.