A Palestinian restaurant in the Mission is a delicious contradiction

The city is expensive, but your next meal doesn’t have to be. The $25 Diner hunts down the best restaurants where you can eat like royalty for a song.

As they say, two things can be true at once.

In the case of Arafat “Art” Herzallah, he is both the owner of Freekeh — a delightful under-the-radar Palestinian restaurant in the Mission that specializes in halal meats — and owner of the breakfast-centric Pork Store Cafe next door. Yes, a halal guy is also a pork guy.

Herzallah, who grew up in Jordan, where his mother is from, was in the bacon business first. He managed the Pork Store Cafe on 16th Street for years before buying it in 2013. Then, in 2021, he leased the space next door so he could open the restaurant he’d always wanted: one focused on the Palestinian food of his father’s family, who hail from Gaza. There was something about the upside down of the pandemic that emboldened him. “It gave me the guts to say, ‘Screw it’ and take the chance,” he says.

It took a visit from his mother, combined with input from his American wife, to come up with recipes that maintain traditional flavors but are served like tapas and better suited to our culture of convenience. Thus, the “rolled bites” section of the menu. Musakhan, a classic Palestinian dish, is typically pieces of bone-in, sumac-and-olive-oil-sopped chicken, and loads of sauteed onions, served atop flatbread that is meant to be ripped and rolled up. At Freekeh, the chicken is boneless and wrapped and sliced “like sushi,” ready to pop into your mouth ($18). Mansaf, a Jordanian dish usually reserved for celebratory feasts, is served on a big platter with rice and chunks of lamb. “You ball it up in your hand and dip it in yogurt,” Herzallah says of the traditional presentation. At Freekeh, it’s also pre-wrapped ($21).

Freekeh is named after an ancient grain, a green durum wheat that Herzallah loves: “I’d choose it over rice any day of the week.” But a meal here starts with complimentary pita chips and a trio of dips: one made of tomatoes, onions, serranos, and dill seeds (“We call it ‘Gaza salsa’”); a mix of tahini, onions, Swiss chard, and garbanzo beans stained almost lavender from sumac; and a simple olive oil and dukkah, which is a blend of ground toasted wheat, cumin, sesame seeds, and other herbs, nuts, and spices.

Everything on the menu is meant to be sharable. You can move on to jibneh nabulsi ($10), a grilled, mild Palestinian cheese. Or, of course, the classic offering of dips ($21), including hummus, baba ganoush, falafel, tabbouleh, and muhammara — the latter, made of red bell pepper and walnuts, is the one I tend to hoard. Also on the menu? Kufta ($18), my favorite variety of kebab, made of ground beef and lamb, served with a polite little skewer of tomato and a little dome of, yes, freekeh.

The interior, decorated with tapestries, is nice, if a bit brightly lit. If the weather permits, sit outside on the cute back patio, painted with a burst of floral patterns. For dessert, get the fantastic kanafeh ($11), made of that same Palestinian cheese coated in shredded phyllo and baked till crisp, all topped with a sugar syrup and pistachios — this alone is reason enough to make a reservation. To counter the aching sweetness, wrap up the evening with a digestif. One feature that Herzallah, who is Muslim, admits has made some of his more religious customers “a little surly”: the fact that Freekeh has a full bar.