How to read a menu
How to read a Arabic menu
You are standing in front of a menu with no pictures and no English, and someone is waiting. This is about that moment.
What actually makes it difficult
Arabic runs right to left in a cursive script where letters change shape depending on where they sit in the word, and short vowels are usually not written at all — which is why the same dish is romanised five different ways. The script is not the real difficulty, though. 'Middle Eastern' covers Levantine, Egyptian, Gulf, Turkish and Persian kitchens, and one dish carries a different name in each. Grilled minced meat is kofta, kefta, kufta or köfte. The aubergine dip is baba ghanoush in some kitchens and mutabbal in others, and in the Levant those are two different recipes rather than two spellings. Turkish menus use the Latin alphabet and Persian menus use a modified Arabic script, so the writing system does not reliably tell you which kitchen you are in either.
Eliminate sections before you read dishes
Middle Eastern menus are grouped by how the food is cooked, and that grouping does most of the work for you. Ruling out a whole section is faster than reading twenty dish names.
The heart of the meal rather than a starter. Many menus split it into cold and hot; the expectation is that you order several and share them, not that you pick one.
Ordered by cut and by skewer. The plainest cooking on the menu, and the section to head for if you want to see what you are eating.
Dough baked with za'atar, cheese or minced lamb on top. A bakery and breakfast item that has migrated onto restaurant menus, so it often sits oddly between the starters and the mains.
Where the slow-cooked dishes live — maqluba, kabsa, stuffed vegetables. Usually one large plate to be shared rather than a course served to one person.
Syrup-soaked pastry and warm cheese desserts. Almost all of them are sweeter than a European dessert, and the syrup is usually scented with orange blossom or rose.
Words worth recognising
Not a phrasebook. Five things that change what you order.
grilled
fried
chicken
meat — usually lamb or beef
vegetarian
Translation is not interpretation
A translator converts words, which sounds like the job and is not. The output is frequently correct and useless at the same time.
شيخ المحشي
Translated word-for-word: “the sheikh of the stuffed things”
Aubergines or courgettes stuffed with minced lamb and pine nuts, usually baked in a yoghurt or tomato sauce. The name is a claim about status among stuffed dishes, not a description of anything you would need to know before ordering.
What Middle Eastern menus don’t print
Nobody is hiding anything. These are foundational ingredients that a Middle Eastern kitchen treats the way you treat salt — not an ingredient, a medium. That is exactly why they never appear in a description.
Far beyond hummus. It thickens the aubergine dips, it is the base of the tarator sauce poured over fish and falafel, it turns up in salad dressings, and it is the main ingredient in halva. Anyone avoiding sesame meets it in places the menu never mentions.
Frequently minced into kofta and kibbeh, and stirred through rice, where it does the work that butter would do elsewhere. It is why the mince tastes richer than beef mince usually does.
Muhammara, fattoush dressing and several braises. It reads as a sour-sweet depth rather than as fruit, so people rarely identify it.
Shish taouk is usually marinated in yoghurt with garlic and lemon, and the yoghurt cooks away — so a grilled chicken skewer that looks entirely dairy-free frequently is not.
The traditional cooking fat for rice, pastry and many stews. Restaurants vary — plenty use oil — which makes it a question rather than an assumption.
Recipes vary between restaurants and change without notice, so treat all of this as what to raise with the kitchen rather than a guarantee about any particular dish. The staff always have the final word.
TableSage reads menus using an AI language model, which gets things wrong sometimes.
Or photograph it and skip the alphabet.
TableSage reads the menu in front of you and tells you what each dish actually is.