An Ammatoli brunch easily solidifies why it is one of the city’s most acclaimed restaurants. From accolades by the James Beard Foundation to a persistent presence on Los Angeles Times food critic Bill Addison’s 101 Best Restaurants list, Chef Dima Habibeh’s space is now synonymous with representing the best of Long Beach food.
And while plates of Palestinian musakhan… Or bowls of foul and mutabbal… Or mansaf and malfouf specials on the weekends have come to define the Levantine restaurant—along with their impeccable sweets from Chef Masah Habibeh, Dima’s daughter—their brunch is definitively distinct, if not wildly and wonderfully different from the onslaught of brunch-gone-decadent offerings common to Long Beach.
An array of offerings at an Ammatoli brunch.Photos by Brian Addison.
The beautiful boldness of an Ammatoli brunch.
You will find no hefty plates of mascarpone-stuffed French toast, add-bacon-on-anything option, or cheese-filled excess. (Though an ordering of knafeh is always recommended. That’s the kataifi-covered circle of heated akkawi cheese that is drizzled with rose water syrup atop it.)
Instead, you will find Chef Dima exercising her mastery of Levantine food while also being her most playful.
Surely, you can score a silver basin of fattet hummus. Garbanzo beans and toasted pita chips are melded with yogurt, tahini, and hummus. Yes, there are bowls of hummus. Some lined with beef shawarma. Others topped with shatta, ground green chiles. Or bowls filled with muhammara, a roasted pepper and walnut dip. There’s her (rightfully) famed shakshouka. A breakfast staple throughout the Levant, tomatoes meet harissa and eggs with charred Serrano chiles. Or her perfected foul. Pale fava beans, cooked and re-cooked for hours, mashed with garlic, lemon juice, tahini, and a heavy pour of olive oil.
But it’s where Chef Dima’s inspiration is drawn from her heavily Latino kitchen that the menu truly shines. It began with her staff making salsas for lunch in her kitchen, which led Chef Dima to explore with habanero chiles, creating the bright orange sauce staple served upon request…
Chef Dima’s continual inspiration from her kitchen staff’s heritages comes alive on her brunch menu.
“Practically my entire kitchen is Mexican,” she once told me. “I watch them cook on their own. And it inspires me because I have always believed that food is a language understood by all.” After that, exploration with tomatillos created a definitively Mexican salsa verde that lines two of her best brunch dishes: the wittily named Hola Shawarma and her Levantine chilaquiles.
The former sees a thin round of pita stuffed with her chicken shawarma—or falafel and foul if you want to go vegan—lined with house pickles before being topped with her salsa verde, a drizzle of liquidized labneh that plays like a Mexican crema, cilantro, feta crumbles mimicking cotija, and onions. The result is a shawarma wrap gone Mexican. If anything, it is a beautiful ode to the Arabic origins of al pastor: Lebanese immigrants hooked lamb up to a spit and put them on tortillas or pitas when emigrating to Puebla, dubbing them “tacos árabes.” This eventually led to the proper trompo and al pastor. Hola Shawarma is quite the romantic reflection of Mexican and Levantine cultures melding.
Secondly, her Levantine chilaquiles, where baked pita triangles are topped with salsa verde and layered with foul and eggs. Bright, hyper-citrusy with its smacking of sumac—plucked from the bush found throughout the Levant, sumac berries are bright red and, when cultivated, are dried and ground into a coarse powder that offers dishes a bright tartness—this dish is a savory lover’s paradise.
Highlights from an Ammatoli brunch.
Need more visual cues? Fear not: Here are my personal faves from an Ammatoli brunch spread.
Hola Shawarma: Shawarma wrap | Tomatillo sauce | Labneh | Feta | Onions | Cilantro | House-made pickles | Sumac
Shakshouka: Poached eggs | Tomato stew | Onions | Peppers | Garlic | Gusto sourdough bread
Levantine chilaquiles: Baked pita | Foul | Tomatillo sauce | Eggs | Sumac
Smoked salmon and za’atar: Puff pastry | Smoked salmon | Za’atar | Labneh | Dill
Fattet hummus: Hummus | Garbanzo beans | Toasted pita | Yogurt-tahini sauce | Parsley | Pomegranate seeds | Toasted almonds
Hummus: With beef shawarma | Pine nuts
Sumac Sunny Side Up: With soukjouk
Manoushe: Your choice of Za’atar | Meat | Jibne | Falafel
Beet-labneh toast: Gusto sourdough toast | Roasted beet labneh | Cauliflower | Dill | Nigella seeds
Avocado toast: Gusto sourdough toast | Avocado | Radish | Mint | Dill | Pomegranate seeds | Za’atar | Extra virgin olive oil
Labneh toast: Gusto sourdough | Labneh | Arugula | Cherry tomatoes | Za’atar | Extra virgin olive oil
The importance of Ammatoli in our expanding food scene.
When Ammatoli first opened in 2018, things were not easy: A fast-casual space where people didn’t understand the difference between Levantine and Greek food, where Chef Dima had to appease American audiences by using the sub-header “Mediterranean bites” under the restaurant’s namesake, one can find the lauded chef becoming teary-eyed when reflecting back on her initial days.
“There were days when we weren’t sure if we could pay our staff, let alone pay off the loans we took out for the space,” Chef Dima said. “But I had a dream.”
The dream is, at least aesthetically, the opposite of what Ammatoli first was. Gone are the TV screens as menus and the walk-up counter. In are two expansions—first toward the east back in 2022 and then, most recently, the “hayati” room (Řياتي), or “my life” in Arabic, toward the west—that have definitively redefined the space. A continual expansion of her menu and the ridding of Mediterranean terms for strictly Arabic ones.
And a man from Qatar with watery eyes as he ate a plate of Palestinian musakhan, pulling Chef Dima aside to tell her that it was a dish he shared deeply with his father—and he hadn’t eaten it since his father’s passing, bringing a surge of both comfort and memories. Or the many millionaires who have offered her to expand her concept to other locations, but her refusal because “Ammatoli is for Long Beach and Long Beach alone.” Or one Jordanian saying Chef Dima’s beef shawarma was the only one comparable to his favorite in the Fifth Circle of Amman.
It is a gem from a woman who fiercely fought for her dream—and we, Long Beach, reap the benefits.
Ammatoli is located at 285 E. 3rd St.
