Ladies Night Out in Riyadh

Last week I was invited to attend a dinner with the ladies from school. This is an annual event organized by a lovely staff member here. She reserved a bus for the 15 of us and we all met in front of the school right after dismissal, abayas in tow. We headed to Karam Beirut, a Lebanese restaurant, about a 40 minute drive from school, and made it in the doors right before prayer time.

We were seated at a long table in the center of the restaurant. You can imagine the noise and hullabaloo that 15 women can make on an evening out together, and I was a little embarrassed that we may have disrupted the few families that were enjoying a quiet meal before we blew in the doors, with our ponytails and wrinkled abayas and our unabashed laughing. Are we perceived as jovial and gregarious...or loud and obnoxious?

It is common for restaurants to have open seating, as we are accustomed to in the US but to also have private dining booths or even whole separate rooms, divided by a door or a curtain where a family can sit and the women may remove their veils to eat. Though I’ve noticed that some women actually manage to eat by just bringing a fork up under their veil and don’t need to remove anything. I guess the benefit to this method is that you don’t need to bother worrying if you have any food in your teeth. You can see some of these private booths along the sides of our dining table.

The menu, which had been pre-ordered and was to be served family style took about 45 minutes - due to our arrival at the start of prayer. But - when the food was finally served it was spectacular. Suddenly the kitchen doors burst open with 4 servers and the table was suddenly an explosion of salads and olives, pickled vegetables, tabbouleh and fattoush, hummus and babaganoush with pomegranate seeds, steaming fresh pita breads, stuffed grape leaves, grilled chicken, lamb and beef shawarma and halloumi (grilled soft white cheese). And that was just the main course! By the way, it takes a certain skill level to be able to successfully reach across a table of food to dip your bread in some hummus without also dunking the sleeve of your abaya in all the other plates on the way - a skill which none of us have yet mastered…

We sipped on mint lemonades with crushed ice and chatted and laughed so more (though quieter now on account of the mouthfuls of food. And then dessert was served - platters of baklava - sticky with honey and sprinkled with crushed pistachios. And something I’ve never had before - ashta which is a plate of clotted cream drizzled with honey and has the consistency of whipped fluff. Delicious!
There was so much food leftover that we all made “husband boxes” to bring home, so they could sample the feast that was this evening, a gesture which all the husbands surely appreciated.
On the bus ride home I got to chat with a few gals that I hadn’t really known before and that was nice. This was a fun excursion out with some ladies and it looks like we have a “Ladies Pizza Night” coming up in just a few more weeks!