Whole cardamom pods. Shawarma marinade. Camel milk. If you're missing an ingredient for your next Mediterranean meal, the new Lebanon Deli & Grocery Store probably has it.
Saif Alazrai, owner of Lebanon Restaurant & Cafe on the lower South Hill, opened the new shop for Middle Eastern groceries on the Newport Highway in a strip mall in front of the Home Depot. As a chef, Alazrai knew how difficult it was to find authentic Lebanese and Jordanian ingredients in Spokane. He began to source his favorite childhood brands and decided to make them available to anyone in the city.
Now, the shelves at Lebanon Deli & Grocery are stocked with high quality tahini, Lebanese coffee, Halal meats and pita bread, both standard and gluten-free. The store also offers pre-made falafel, marinades and condiments to make cooking Lebanese food at home less intimidating. A cold case is full of ready-to-eat, made-from-scratch hummus, baba ganoush and baklava that were previously only available at the restaurant. The small-but-expanding store is making za'atar, saffron, sumac and many other flavors of the Levant more accessible to everyone in Spokane.
Alazrai grew up in Jounieh, a coastal Lebanese city about 10 miles north of Beirut. His father owned restaurants around the country. While Alazrai was in school, he spent his summers in restaurant kitchens, mostly at his family's resort in the semi-desert northeastern region of the country. That part of Lebanon was quiet and still, Alazrai remembers, with no electricity poles. It was a popular destination for tourists, which are Lebanon's primary source of income, Alazrai says.
"So we were [serving] breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, and I was spending most of my time in the kitchen with the chefs there," Alazrai says. "I was really just waiting for the summer to go there."
He liked the work so much, his father encouraged him to study hospitality in college. Alazrai got a degree in hotels and restaurant management from the Hashemite University in Zarqa, Jordan.
While Alazrai grew up, his mother took trips to Spokane to visit her mother who lived here. About 10 years ago, violence kicked up again in Lebanon and tourism suffered. Alazrai's family decided to move to the U.S. permanently and settled near his grandmother in Spokane.
Naturally, Alazrai wanted to open a Lebanese restaurant in his new home. Two years ago he opened Lebanon Restaurant & Cafe in the Cooper George apartment building on Fifth Avenue, near MultiCare Deaconess Hospital. It quickly became a go-to lunch spot for hospital employees and patients for its fresh, healthy food that's delicious but also amenable to plenty of different dietary preferences, including gluten-free, vegetarian and vegan.
Seven older Lebanese women, including Alazrai's mother, wake up early to stuff grape leaves, fold cheese pies, make hummus and shape falafel for the restaurant.
"These ladies used to make grape leaves for 50 years at least," Alazrai says. "They are moms. They have their own houses. They are known in Spokane that they make very good food, especially in the Arab community. So we are lucky to have them here. We are like a family working together. They love the place and we love them. It's like their own place."
The backbone of Lebanese cuisine is fresh, high quality ingredients, Alazrai says. He won't put anything on his menu that he can't source good ingredients for. As he tried to get more and more Lebanese ingredients to Spokane, he came up with the idea of opening an entire grocery store.
Alazrai and his brother, Yazan, traveled to California and Chicago, where most Middle Eastern food is first imported into the U.S. They picked out the nostalgic brands they grew up with, but also a large selection of important products, like 15 different kinds of tea and a dozen brands of Turkish coffee. They chose a huge selection of spices, many of them whole to hold flavor longer. The new grocer offers multiple brands of za'atar, a memorable Levantine spice mix with sesame, sumac, oregano, marjoram and coriander, plus unique products like white chickpeas and whole honeycomb.
"We also went to the next level," Alazrai says. "Not only the ingredients, but we made things that [will make it] very easy, especially for local people, to cook Lebanese food, or to just need maybe a step or two to finish it."
Alazrai made sure to stock jars of toum, a popular but finicky Lebanese garlic sauce. Prepared shawarma marinade guarantees the right flavor every time. Whole falafel is ready to be fried, baked or microwaved. And a rotating selection of specialty items like amba, an Iraqi fermented mango sauce, can elevate the simplest dish into something new and delicious.
Against one wall of the small store, a cold case offers some of the grape leaves, dips and desserts that Alazrai's team of Lebanese mothers make for his restaurant. Starting on Dec. 15, both the restaurant and the grocer will offer special gift boxes of handmade baklava ($20-$30) for the holidays.
Ironically, many families in Lebanon don't go grocery shopping very often — many people grow most of their food, and trade with one another for what they can't grow. In Lebanon, Alazrai's family had an olive grove, which provided olive oil to eat and to trade for labneh and other dairy products from his uncle's sheep herd.
But for now in Spokane, Alazrai is excited to do what he can to bring new flavors and old traditions to his new home.
"You can be successful anywhere, not necessarily just in your own country, if you have the know-how and the passion," he says. "Nothing is easy, actually, there or here. Nothing is easy, but like everything else, we have to work hard to give the best to our community to our customers." ♦
Lebanon Deli & Grocery Store • 9222 N. Newport Hwy. • Open daily 10 am-7 pm • facebook.com/lebanongrocery
