Ayat, 2112 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
When Ayat Masoud and her husband Abdul Elenani opened the original Ayat in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in 2020, they wanted to “spread the message about what’s happening in Palestine through food and culture” in the neighborhood where they had both grown up.
Their “Palestinian soul food” restaurant, with a prominent mural of a woman weeping and Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem guarded by Israeli soldiers, became a local favorite in a neighborhood where many restaurants fly a Palestinian flag. Since then, Ayat has expanded to eight locations across four boroughs and New Jersey— and gained a wider following. The restaurant gave free meals to Zohran Mamdani’s campaign volunteers, and the mayor-elect visited the restaurant’s Manhattan outpost this week.
Early next year, Elenani is expanding with several more locations across the country. Ayat DC will open by April on the ground floor of a sleek glassy office building in Foggy Bottom.
The building is surrounded by George Washington University campus buildings, lobbying firms, and white-shoe law offices, and also houses the offices of the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington.
“Expanding to DC allows us to share our message of community and our cultural pride in a city where a lot of those conversations and decisions about Palestine happen,” Elenani says. “DC is what shapes the world.”
Elenani expects Ayat’s DC location to focus more on work lunch than its New York counterparts, but he doesn’t plan to change the menu, which is fairly traditional. An order might start with a Palestinian mezze platter of hummus, baba ganoush, muhammarah, tabbouleh, tahina, and labne, and move on to a mixed grill kebab platter over rice.
Ayat is best known for its elaborate Palestinian home-cooking showstoppers, many of which involve freshly baked flatbreads. One is msakhan: roasted chicken heaped with slow-cooked onions, sumac, and pine nuts, served over taboon flatbread. Another is fattat jaj, rice and chicken layered with chickpeas, mint yogurt, crispy pita, garlic sauce, and slivered almonds. The former New York Times food critic Pete Wells was fond of Ayat’s mansaf— lamb stewed in fermented dried yogurt and served over saj bread and rice.
Elenani is especially excited about opening in DC because he thinks the city’s diners already understand Palestinian cooking, in part because of chef Michael Rafidi’s Albi and Yellow.
Serving explicitly Palestinian food is inherently political, Elenani says, especially since the Gaza War (after October 7, the restaurant endured a campaign of negative reviews). But the main purpose of Ayat is to create a space that makes everyone feel welcome and captures the culinary traditions that he and Masoud grew up with.
“We’re just food at the end of the day,” Elenani says. “But apparently food is pretty powerful because it gets under peoples’ skin.”
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