Jerusalem Garden introduced Middle Eastern food to Western North Carolina
three decades ago.

Frank Badr eats hummus every single day, and he says if you do too, you’ll live longer. But only if you eat his hummus, made fresh every morning at Jerusalem Garden Café, the restaurant he owns and runs with his wife Sonia.

“When I opened Jerusalem Garden in 1993 – or maybe it was 1994 – my type of food wasn’t known. If I was smarter, I would have opened a restaurant with steaks, burgers and baked potatoes,” he says with a laugh.

Instead, he was driven to introduce the dishes of his homeland in the Middle East to his adopted home in Western North Carolina. “I landed in Asheville in 1975 and fell in love with the mountains and the people,” he explains. “I opened Jerusalem Garden to serve a Mediterranean diet.

It wasn’t easy; cuisine that was very unfamiliar to locals was not the only challenge he faced. When he took the space on Patton Avenue, it was vacant, and so were many of the buildings in downtown Asheville. “This may have been a piano store before, but it was empty when I looked at it. If I walked to Pack Square, every block was five or six closed businesses, old buildings, unfinished.”

The tourism boom had not kicked in, nor had the explosion of breweries and restaurants. Beer City and Foodtopia were not even little sparks in the minds of future marketers.

Frank had experience in retail, but none in hospitality or restaurants; he had no culinary education, but he had passion and determination. “I am not a culinary guy, not a trained cook, but I know how to do things,” he says. “Making food is like being an artist making a painting. If you give five chefs the same recipe to cook something, they will create five different things. It is the heart that cooks. I cook from my heart.”

Before opening the doors and serving one bowl of hummus, he painted the blank canvas with stain glass inlays in the front windows, terra cotta hued walls, swaths of jewel-tone silk draped across the ceiling, beaded chandeliers and one room transformed into an exotic oasis in an enormous Egyptian tent.

He compares the locals lack of exposure to Middle Eastern food 30 years ago to his favorite sport. “I grew up playing soccer, I played right wing in high school and college. When I moved to the U.S. in 1975, you couldn’t find a soccer shoe or ball anywhere. Now soccer is everywhere.”

Much like hummus, now ubiquitous in big box grocery stores and packaged for convenience store snacks. Frank is glad to note the popularity but dismisses the process. “There is a lot of machine-made hummus, it’s made in big batches, delivered in 25-pound tubs and has a lot of preservatives.”

The hummus at Jerusalem Garden begins with large dry garbanzo beans; they are washed, soaked overnight, washed again in the morning, boiled, then cooled. “From there, you do your own recipe,” he says. “Making hummus is hard work and time consuming. I could feed 100 people a burger in the time it takes me to make hummus for the day. But we will always make it fresh.”
In fact, he points out, everything at Jerusalem is made by hand and fresh. The baba ganoush — fresh from whole eggplants. The tabouli – which he swears is the world’s healthiest salad – made with fresh parsley, mint, lemon and tomatoes. Falafel –made from ground dried garbanzo beans, not the powder.

And don’t get him started on canned stuffed grape leaves. “A salesman brought them to me to try and when I opened the can I was disgusted. Our grape leaves start with the leaves, we soak them, we wash them, we trim them, we stuff them with our recipe and roll them one by one.”

He acknowledges that the sauces found in Middle Eastern restaurants – tzatziki and Moroccan harissa for example – can be bought by the jug, but theirs are made in the kitchen. So is what he calls green sauce – parsley, cilantro, lemon juice and fresh ginger – which dresses their kibbeh and potatoes.

The lunch and dinner menus are similar – appetizers, salads, bowls (which he added a couple years ago), gyros and plates. Everything is cooked to order, with the exception of the lamb shank. “It’s a Moroccan recipe – we use dried apricots, cilantro, ras hanout spice, carrots – and cook for six to seven hours. We cook the lamb rack to order and finish it in the oven with ground pistachio and pomegranate molasses.”

Vegetarians and vegans are well-served at Jerusalem Garden; in addition to the usual suspects of hummus, falafel and tabouli, Frank brags on Sonia’s development of muhamarah, a creamy savory-sweet dip made of roasted red bell peppers, pureed with toasted walnuts and pomegranate molasses, served as an appetizer with baked pita.

Sonia is also the baker and dessert maker, with specialties like mabromah — shaped kataifi dough filled with pistachio and glazed with a rose flavored syrup; warbat, a phyllo dough stuffed with kashsta and topped with pistachio; and Middle Eastern/Mediterranean classic knafeh, made with shredded baked phyllo, melted sweetened cheese and drizzled with syrup and pistachio. “Some places in the Middle East, they only make knafeh, all day. There are lines outside the shops, like for ice cream in America.”

Like so many, Frank is troubled by the tensions of politics, religion and cultures, and hopes to provide a welcoming, serene place where all people can gather at the table, for good food and compassionate conversation. “Food is love, but love is the glue, the only glue that can bring countries and people and cultures together. We need more love.”