The Female Chefs Taking Bahraini Food to the World

05.01.2024 - 18:33 / cntraveler.com / Yannick Alléno

Fried safi fish, marinated pieces of beef tikka, and sweet, aromatic chai karak are some of the flavors that ran through my childhood in Bahrain. But if there is one ingredient that’s ubiquitous in the Middle Eastern archipelago, it is black lime—also known as black lemon, or lumee. This has become Bahrain’s unofficial culinary ambassador over the past few years, thanks to a handful of chefs, many of them women, on a mission to introduce the country’s cuisine to the rest of the world.

Bahraini chef Dona Murad with her lumee babka.

The fruit, which hails from Oman but is also associated with Iran, is blanched in salty brine before being sun dried, so its flesh and peel turn a deep black. Its intensely citrusy flavour is commonly used in stews, soups, sauces and curries. I remember it best from Bahraini tikka, small cubes of barbecued meat and fat doused in black lime and served with fresh bread still steaming from the tandoor. Today, Bahraini restaurateur Dona Murad, who owns the coolly minimal Librae Bakery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, employs it in a far more unconventional way. She puts it in a babka, a knotted brioche bun with lemon curd and ground black lime that’s at once tart, sweet and creamy.

Since it opened a year ago, Murad’s latest cafe venture—a “third-culture bakery” that melds Bahraini hospitality with New York influences and cooking techniques from Copenhagen—has attracted a cult following, Murad’s fans queueing around the block for pastries, with her lumee babka a top seller, alongside rose and pistachio croissants and mango and saffron sticky buns.

Librae Bakery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

She can’t take credit for taking black lime global, however. She says that accolade goes to Noor Murad, a Bahraini-born chef who has worked extensively with Yotam Ottolenghi over the years. “We’re not related, but she’s my lumee sister,” she says with a laugh. “I had one woman turn up to Librae looking for that specific flavor because she’d heard of it from Noor and Ottolenghi.”

Tala Bashmi is another young female chef putting Bahraini cuisine on the map. Her pioneering set-menu restaurant, Fusions by Tala, has brought new life to the iconic Gulf Hotel while she racks up accolades, including as the only Arab chef on the 2022 Best Chef Awards list, next to names such as Anne-Sophie Pic and Yannick Alléno. Bashmi uses black lime in her own version of Bahraini tikka, which takes marinated A5 Wagyu beef and pairs it with a lumee gel and date pickle, all wrapped in a shiso leaf to be eaten in one bite. It’s Bahrain’s culinary connection to seafood that most interests her, though. “As an island, you can see our culture through the fishermen and heritage of pearl divers,” she tells me,