Qamariyah, Four Elms Road, Cardiff: restaurant review

So often, restaurants are where we make important memories. Several local places I’ve loved have changed hands recently, and it’s hard to walk back through those doors without the past tugging at your sleeve.

Take the newly opened Qamariyah: when this was the city’s only Persian restaurant, Mowlana, it gave me my favourite memory of all.

There have been some lucky experiences over the years, with the odd pinch-me thrown in for good measure. Eating the Ynyshir tasting menu for £85 the last time it was served, or being the only table invited into a world-famous three Michelin-starred, San Sebastian kitchen with its thirty chefs- a surreal sequence only topped when Chef asked if we wouldn’t mind having a selfie with her. I still wonder who she thought I was. Or the solo tour of Castile’s temple to steak, ending with the team cutting huge chuletones from world-class sides of beef ready for that hungry grill.

Or bringing food writers for long, boozy lunches to Cardiff so my favourite local restaurants could have their first national reviews. These aren’t recollections I have ever shared in detail, because sometimes it’s the private memories which we hold dearest: perhaps most poignantly, 1am new dad and football chat in a development kitchen above a Bristol standout, with a much-missed chef and his brother the first time I ever ate with the intention of writing about my dinner.

It hasn’t been all beer and skittles. Did I willingly eat the ‘genuine US low and slow BBQ’ at Coyote Ugly? Yes, yes I did. Thank you for asking: and it was certainly memorable, and has made its presence felt since. In the way an ingrowing toenail does. Or a tropical hookworm, come to think of it.

And yet I’d swap them all for something rather more humble: my then seven year old daughter deciding to bring me to Mowlana for a birthday meal. She ordered for me, asked for the bill, paid in cash, and walked out, her fingers laced through mine, happy she had done all that in a place where we had already made good memories together. Our place, made even more special. For years, my phone wallpaper was the look of quietly twinkling pride she radiated that night.

But times change, Mowlana is no more, and in its place is Qamariyah. You’ll have noticed a quiet proliferation of Yemeni restaurants in the city over the last few years. Since I told you about (yes, here come the links) Hadramowt on City Road just over three years ago, I’ve written about Kingdom of Sheba on Bute St and Grangetown’s Bab Al-Yemen. I’ve followed my nose and ended up at Al-Madina Mandi, The South Kitchen (on Broadway, and again when it moved recently) and even the Somali-Yemeni collaboration at Ayeeyo’s Kitchen. A visit to newcomer Yemeni Sketch is imminent. It hasn’t been all plain sailing, Socotra rebranding as Yemeni Crown wasn’t enough to keep it going, but it’s clear the community which has been growing here as long ago as the 1860s is making itself felt in the capital’s wider foodscape.

Qamariyah has only been open a couple of weeks but at lunch on an overcast Thursday a clutch of tables is taken. The kitchen sounds busy, and there’s something for everyone: this is very much all day dining with a substantial breakfast menu served until 1pm. I am tempted, particularly by the idea of spiced liver stir-fry and baked eggs with peppers and flatbread.

But I hold firm: I’m here for the mandi. It’s always the mandi. It has become one of my all-timers, something which never fails to hit the mark.

Inside, changes have been kept to a minimum. The light still streams through those tall windows (a ‘qamariyah’ is an arched Yemeni stained-glass window) though here you’ll have to settle for the exotic sights of Four Elms Road.

There are two welcome reminders of former visits, though: the whirring of the juicer brings a bracing glass of lemon and mint. The second? That’ll be the bread.

Fahsa, one of those subtly spiced, warming lamb stews, starts as a spiced vegetable stew before the lamb is added and cooked in two stages, ending in a stone pan (maqla). There is five hours’ worth of gentle cooking here and it shows. It is served topped with a plug of hulba. That turns out to be fenugreek paste- my server, owner Ahmed, tells me the plant is much prized in Yemeni cooking as an aid to digestion.

‘Move it to the side if you don’t like it, but it’s how we eat it at home,’ he says. An acquired taste maybe, but one I’m happy to persist with, and that earthy, bitter taste is instantly compelling against the meaty richness of the broth. This isn’t food to rush, but the sort of thing made for lingering over with soft scoops of bread. And what bread it is: mulawah style, speckled with black onion seeds, flaky, lightly buttery, crisp in parts, gentky tearable in others, the perfect accompaniment. It is huge, surely twenty inches across, its dimensions an echo of the legendarily massive Mowlana naan.

‘We try to represent Arab and Yemeni generosity, even in our food portions!’ laughs Ahmed, and you could swaddle a newborn baby in its folds. Actually, for the more compactly-built among you, you could happily pull it over you for the inevitable post-mandi nap. It is also served as part of their breakfast, so you have no excuses. Just have it, whatever you do.

I miss the little bowl of cooking liquor (maraq) served elsewhere with mandi, but that’s soon forgotten. You know the script by now: a mound of rice perfumed with cooking juices, here presented with the bite of raw white onion slivers; the bowl of sahawiq, or zhug, chilli sauce; meat steamed to the point it shrugs itself free of bones stained yellow (that will be the turmeric in the hawaiij spice mix). This is food not for the prissy, but for those who know the simple joy of sharing good food with people you care about. It means moments of quiet happiness.

The chicken- half the bird, the skin vividly spice-stained scarlet to ochre and all shades in between- is faultlessly tender, another plate to put a quiet smile on your face. Again, this may seem like simple cooking. It isn’t.

It makes me happy to see this building open again, and even happier to see it in the hands of people who love what they do. I turned up as a paying punter, only to find as I tried to settle my bill that a mutual contact had tipped Ahmed off about my lunch plans. He wouldn’t take any money from me, despite me asking four times, which is remarkably kind. But that sense of generosity is already writ large across the menu at Qamariyah, and here’s to this new business prospering.

Qamariyah, 2 Four Elms Rd, Cardiff CF24 1LE

https://qamariyah.com/