A Syrian Dinner To Commemorate Syrian Revolution

We raised a glass (of water, because the restaurant is dry) to the Syrian people at Aleppo’s Kitchen, praying that the new government would not be worse than the last and that peace would return to that afflicted land.

As Syrians Revolt, A Syrian Dinner At Aleppo’s Kitchen In Southern California

I’ve written about Aleppo’s Kitchen before, a Syrian restaurant in Anaheim, California that my family loves. I don’t usually write about our family restaurant visits, but our latest dinner took on a whole new meaning after the Syrian people overthrew the regime of Bashar Al-Assad in the completion of a revolution that began over a decade ago.

It’s difficult to topple a government…but it is even more difficult to secure the pace.

In fact, I’m not even sure if commemorate is the right word. Perhaps recognize? As a traveler, I had hoped to visit Syria during the Assad regime and appreciated its protection of Christian minorities, but also recognized that this London-trained doctor was a butcher…and so was his father. There is a price to pay, sometimes via the sacrifice of civil liberties, in order to keep the peace, but there seemed to be a disproportionality at play here…

I’m not celebrating that the mausoleum of Hafez al-Assad was desecrated yesterday…the monuments of the past are a necessary (and harrowing) reminder of what we must guard against in the future and a vivid reminder that history is doomed to repeat itself if we let it..

But the Syrian people are a hard-working and proud people…that is no trite cliché and we see it locally at restaurants like Aleppo’s Kitchen…and part of me is hopeful…perhaps naively so…that the new government will not just represent a different flavor of dictatorship and oppression but a golden opportunity to transform a nation that has been shackled for far too long by a cabal of self-interest.

So I may have celebrated with mansaf, the Jordanian national dish (I just cannot help myself when we drive down here with this superb Bedouin dish), but we had a wonderful feast of salads, yogurt, hummus, falafel, and kabobs…plus decadent desserts. It was an amazing meal as always, but it took on new meaning in an era of decisive change in Syria.