Artistic Expression

Manal Jarrar talks like she’s eating. She savors each word like tiny morsels while her expressive hands portray them. Stirring the pot and whipping sentences together, she talks like she’s cooking too.

I lift a cup of steaming hot chai to my mouth and the tall brunette’s eyes widen. She raises her chin in anticipation and responds to what can only be my expression. “See I didn’t want to say,” she exclaims. “It’s just there.”  “It” being the proof of her passion, which was once more of a guilty pleasure.

As a child growing up in Israel, Jarrar saw both worlds in her Palestinian family. She describes the handmade oven where her grandmother would bake bread and where country days were the color of the thick honey and homemade olive oil. But it was the juxtaposition of her mother’s “modern” family that put her passion for cooking aside.

“My father’s mother would cut the onion and for some reason I despise this large woman with the smell of the onion—maybe deny who I am.  So I decided I want to be a ballerina.” It’s why Jarrar took ballet classes her entire life, and continued them after moving with her husband to the U.S. where he was to study computer science.

In the details that likely go overlooked, the atmosphere at her cafe pays tribute to that story. Drapes hang low on what looks like a barre, perhaps the same height as the one where Jarrar first stretched her slippered feet. One position in particular would inspire the cafe’s namesake: Arabesque. Like the graceful script the Arabic word is written in on the cafe’s awning, it describes a ballet position that flutters from the crown of the head and strengthens through the extended leg.

“You know,” she says of dance and food, “I compete with myself.” I set the  chai tea back onto its porcelain and Jarrar seizes the opportunity to give an example: “It took me six months to do this. I added a little bit of this here, this there. I became great, you know? I mean I became great as a mother and as a cook.”

The two are the same for the mother of three. It was perfecting her children’s lunches that got her cooking noticed in the first place. After trying Jarrar’s food at school, a fellow parent asked if she would be her personal chef. “At that time I wasn’t ready to open my cafe restaurant. Then one day I said, ‘You know, I think I’m going to do it, to take a risk.’ And you know I’m scared, but I don’t really have psychological fears. I don’t really have experience with it, so I just went.”

The result is a small cafe serving Mediterranean cuisine where crispy baklava melts into saturated layers of honey-sweet phyllo, complemented perfectly by a cup of spicy chai. It’s where the menu features local favorites like chicken shwarma and hummus, and where food is yet another form of artistic expression. For Jarrar, who waves away an imaginary dish as she says “that if I eat something and I don’t feel nothing, I just don’t eat it anymore,” that expression comes from a woman who has a flare for the dramatic but who also knows when to give up the spotlight. And she does on occasion—but only for the food.