The World’s Best Levantine Food

The name translates as "Maryam's dining table," and the room commits to that promise, with Palestinian art on the walls and bread baked fresh throughout service. This is a Levantine restaurant where sharing is the default and portions make that easy. The Michelin Bib Gourmand and a spot on MENA's 50 Best list follow the chef's reputation for threading centuries of Middle Eastern culinary tradition through genuinely inventive technique, including a labneh crème brûlée topped with za'atar ice cream.

1. The 50 #7 · MENA's 50 Best Restaurants
2. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand
3. Eater The 27 Best Restaurants in Dubai

A wood-burning oven anchors this fast-casual Levantine cafe in Georgetown, where the line out the door reorganizes itself around whatever Michael Rafidi's team pulled from it most recently. Mornings run on pastries and shakshuka; afternoons shift to stuffed pitas and batata tots with urfa sauce. By night it flips to table service and a dinner menu. The Michelin Guide gave it a Bib Gourmand, which tracks.

1. AAA Approved
2. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand
3. The Rammys Finalist · Fast Casual Restaurant of the Year

Emmett is a Kensington restaurant that treats the Levant as a starting point and then wanders off through France, Italy, and the American South without a map. The cocktail list includes a lamb fat washed rye, so the bar is also in on it. Dinner here is a sit-down affair, polished and on the pricier side, and the James Beard folks nominated it for Best New Restaurant. The main problem is ordering a reasonable amount.

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The lakeside terrace, glass-enclosed and hovering over the water, sets the tone for a Levantine restaurant that treats home cooking as a serious project. Generational recipes share the menu with modern riffs on classic flavors, and the claypot dishes especially carry that slow, considered quality. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand and a spot on MENA's 50 Best list. The lunch soup-and-daily special is the kind of deal that turns a quick stop into a regular habit.

1. The 50 Sevenrooms Icon Award 2026 · MENA's 50 Best Restaurants · Salam Dakkak
2. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

Up a set of funkily painted stairs off a Union Market alley, this French-Levantine bistro from the chef behind Albi earns its own conversation. The hummus topped with smoky escargots and arak butter landed on the New York Times list of best dishes across the country, and the falafel with dill yogurt and trout roe is close behind. Za'atar cocktails, jewel-toned walls, and habibi funk on vinyl fill out the rest.

1. The Rammys Finalist · New Restaurant of the Year
2. The New York Times 2025 · The Restaurant List
3. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A queue snaking down Rue Saint-Bernard in the 11th is usually a reliable sign you should abandon your plans and join it. Mokonuts is a small bakery-café where a Japanese-Lebanese couple blends Levantine cooking with serious pastry training, the kind that produces tahini cookies and fig tarts with black sesame that make the wait feel incidental. Lunch runs toward punchy Middle Eastern flavors, but the baked goods are why locals circle back.

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3. The 50 The 50 Discovery

Za'atar and labneh croissants sit next to a chocolate seven-spice cruffin in the pastry case, which tells you most of what you need to know about this fast-casual Levantine café in Ivy City. French technique carries the baked goods, while the kitchen leans into the Middle East for everything else. Evenings bring charcoal-grilled kebabs and meze from an open hearth, so the place quietly shapeshifts between breakfast spot and dinner counter without making a fuss about it.

1. The Rammys Finalist · Pastry Chef or Baker of the Year · Alicia Wang
2. The Rammys Finalist · Fast Casual Restaurant of the Year
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Pink roses painted floor to ceiling and a Turkish coffee set mounted overhead set the tone before the food arrives. Beit Rima is a casual Middle Eastern small-plates spot where the Lebanese, Palestinian, and Jordanian menu is designed for sharing a little of everything: baked halloumi spiked with jalapeño, flatbread scented with nigella, crispy spiced potatoes. The New York Times named it one of San Francisco's 25 best restaurants right now, and the room makes a convincing case on its own.

1. The New York Times The 25 Best Restaurants in San Francisco Right Now
2. San Francisco Chronicle Best Middle Eastern restaurants in the Bay Area
3. The Infatuation #18 · The 25 Best Restaurants In SF

1. The New York Times 2026 · 1 star, Critic's Pick · Restaurant Review
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Open-flame cooking runs through everything at this cozy Levantine restaurant in Redwood City, from spiced chicken to cauliflower roasted until it's tender inside and crisped at the edges. The menu leans into Jordanian-style street food, with falafel, baba ghanoush, and shawarma slicked in garlicky toum alongside larger sharing plates. A James Beard semifinalist in 2025, it draws families into a plant-filled dining room where the light comes in from above.

1. San Francisco Chronicle Best Middle Eastern restaurants in the Bay Area
2. San Francisco Chronicle Best restaurants in Palo Alto, San Jose, the Peninsula and South Bay
3. James Beard Awards 2025 · Semifinalist · Best Chef: California · Jordan Makableh and Saif Makableh

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

Cafe Yaya is an all-day neighborhood cafe in Lincoln Park from the team behind Galit, and it opens early enough to catch the weekday breakfast crowd. The menu blends Levantine, French, and Southern ideas, which sounds like a lot until you meet the smoked lamb bacon in a BLT. Order at the counter, stay for the lemon pound cake, and expect a casual, low-key morning that stays well under fine-dining money. Eater has it on its Chicago breakfast list.

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The crust on Z&Z's za'atar manoushe is chewy through the middle and genuinely crisp all the way to the edge, which sounds simple until you're eating it. This four-table Levantine flatbread bakery in Rockville operates something like a pizzeria, with variations on the signature item boxed up to go. The New York Times named it among D.C.'s top restaurants, and Bon Appétit put it on its best new restaurants list.

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2. The New York Times The 25 Best Restaurants in Washington, D.C., Right Now

1. The 50 The 50 Discovery

Palestinian and Jordanian cooking in a Roncesvalles dining room where the menu runs à la carte or prix fixe and the bar pours only mocktails. The kitchen pulls from both family tradition and refined technique, so brined lamb chops and sea bass wrapped in grilled grape leaves sit alongside an Angus short rib built for assembling into flatbread handhelds. Dessert ends on sticky date with cinnamon ice cream. No wine list, but nobody seems to miss it.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Lebanese restaurant inside the Guarda Golf Hotel in Crans-Montana, with the kind of Alpine panorama that makes the mezze feel incidental. The kitchen leans into Levantine sharing plates, borek and grilled aubergines among them, before pivoting to chocolate tartlets for dessert, because Switzerland insists. The interior is polished, the service is precise, and the wine cellar is taken rather seriously by people who take wine seriously.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The name means "party" in Hebrew, and the Levantine restaurant at the base of the Moxy Williamsburg takes that seriously, with a sleek, buzzy room that nods to Tel Aviv's Bauhaus architecture. The menu moves from baba ganoush and falafel through whole striped bass and dumplings filled with charred onion ricotta, the kind of spread that makes ordering light feel like a personal failure. The Basque cheesecake has become the unofficial closing argument.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Dinner at this mezze bar starts with a communal platter of vegetarian small plates before you choose a main, a format that makes sharing feel built-in rather than optional. It sits beneath the same roof as Julia Komp's fine-dining restaurant Sahila, but the mood here is looser, the cooking Levant-leaning: kohlrabi dolma, preserved lemon, couscous. Warm tones, a courtyard terrace in summer, and a well-stocked international wine list.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The name means "little one" in Aramaic, and the room delivers on that promise with stone walls, concrete, and hardwood floors gathered around an open kitchen. This Levantine wine bar and small-plates spot in the 18th leans into the Eastern Mediterranean with sharing plates that smell like somewhere warmer than Paris. The mofletta-wrapped lamb arayes alone justify the detour.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

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Falafel x Bar is a Levantine counter-service spot that doubles as a natural wine shop, so the bottle you grab off the shelf is also your dinner plan. The patio garden is big enough for a group that would rather split snacks than commit to entrees, and the tinned fish board turns up there alongside pickled things and sumac-dusted fries. Eating in gets you the toppings bar. Lunch to-go works too, but it skips the garden.

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Shakshuka and a Negroni sounds like a contradiction until you sit down at Mayfield, a modern Mediterranean restaurant in San Juan Capistrano where Levantine and North African flavors run alongside classic California instincts. The menu moves from Turkish eggs with labneh at brunch to za'atar fried chicken at dinner, with a harissa-aioli burger at happy hour for anyone who needs convincing. The cocktail list keeps pace.

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The pitas come straight from a wood-fired oven inside what used to be a parking garage, the signage deliberately subtle enough that you feel clever for finding it. This is a fast, casual Levantine and Mediterranean spot where the menu roams from falafel and lamb kofta to chicken tandoori, with North African and South Asian detours along the way. The long communal table fills with Eixample office workers at noon, so go early or embrace the wait.

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A stone oven dominates the floor of what was once a fast-food shell on Milwaukee's south side, turning out taboon bread and stuffed fatayer at a pace that explains the "bakery" in the name. The Jordanian and Palestinian menu runs wider than that, though: hummus, baba ghanoush, kebabs, eggs, fried cheeses, Turkish coffee. Elaborate rugs and ornate lamps make the room feel nothing like its previous life.

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