Al Badawi – Brooklyn Heights' first Palestinian table, built for a crowd

On Atlantic Avenue, where Middle Eastern grocers and restaurants have traded for decades, Al Badawi opened its doors in 2021 as Brooklyn Heights' first Palestinian restaurant, and did so to considerable fanfare, quickly drawing coverage from the New Yorker, Eater and the New York Times. It is selected in the MICHELIN Guide, listed among New York's Middle Eastern addresses in the 2025 selection. The room announces itself before you sit down: a wall of faux flowers at the entrance, repeated above the open kitchen inside, sets a tone that is unapologetically festive rather than restrained. Tables are oversized, the soundtrack is lively, and nothing on the menu arrives in a portion built for one. This is food meant to be pulled apart by hand, passed across a crowded table, and eaten until everyone agrees they are finished — a Levantine instinct for hospitality transplanted onto a Brooklyn street that has long made room for it.

01The room and the setting

The faux-floral facade is the restaurant's calling card on a stretch of Atlantic Avenue known for its Arab-American shopfronts. Inside, the flowers climb the walls and hang over the kitchen, where a domed oven near the door turns out hot, thin saj bread through the evening. The dining room is built for groups rather than quiet dinners for two, with oversized tables suited to the platters that define the menu.

02The owners

Al Badawi was opened by Abdul Elenani, owner of the Palestinian restaurant Ayat, and his longtime friend Akram Nassir, who also runs Yemen Café up the same street. Al Badawi calls itself the first family-style Palestinian restaurant in New York City. Nassir, besides being a restaurateur and father of three, has worked as a commercial pilot for Delta for eighteen years. The partnership came together quickly: Nassir's hundred-year-old father ate at Ayat, loved it, and insisted the two men do something together in the empty Atlantic Avenue space Nassir was holding; a month later, Al Badawi opened its doors.

Insider tip

BYOB; platters are built for sharing — order for the table, not for one.

03The cooking

The kitchen works in two sizes only: huge, serving one or two, and super-enormous, serving three or four. The mansaf — fatty lamb over buttery rice with layers of saj flatbread — is a dish Elenani also serves at Ayat, and it anchors the menu alongside six-layered constructions like fattat lahma, built from beef, rice, chickpeas, pita chips, almonds, mint and garlic tahini, and maklouba, which stacks chicken, eggplant, cauliflower and potatoes before being flipped at the table. Ouzi lamb and stews such as fasolia and bamia round out the larger-format cooking the restaurant is known for.

The flatbreads, cooked to order in the oven by the door, became the dish that put Al Badawi on the wider food map: the New York Times named the pistachio flatbread, its nuts ground to dust and scattered over melted mozzarella, one of its 25 most memorable dishes of 2022.

04What to order

Start with the mezze filistini, a spread of baba ghanoush and hummus built to be mopped up with warm bread. Follow with musakhan, roast chicken with sumac and onions over taboon bread, or the mansaf for the table. The pistachio flatbread and fattat jaj are the dishes regulars order on repeat, and the ouzi lamb or lamb chops suit anyone wanting the kitchen's heavier, meat-forward side.

05Wine and drinks

Al Badawi does not pour alcohol — it operates on a straightforward BYOB policy, which has made it a fixture on lists of the city's best bring-your-own-bottle spots for exactly the kind of boisterous birthday dinners and big-group nights its oversized tables are built for.

06The neighbourhood

Al Badawi sits at 151 Atlantic Avenue, between Clinton and Henry Streets, on a stretch of the avenue that has carried Middle Eastern restaurants and grocers for decades. It remains Brooklyn Heights' first Palestinian restaurant, a title that still sits with the Elenani and Nassir families as their flatbreads and platters continue to draw crowds from across the city to this one block.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.