This Is the Only Salmon You’ll Ever Need, Plus Other Dishes from L.A.’s Hottest Modern Middle Eastern Restaurant
Stellar recipes to cook now.
Kismet Copyright © 2024 by Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson. Photographs copyright © 2024 by Chris Bernabeo. Published by Clarkson Potter, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group.
Was it the rotisserie chicken or the pickles? The falafel flecked with bright green herbs and freshly toasted spices, fried until crackling brown, stuffed into wraps or adorning bowls dotted with pickled vegetables and lashed with zhoug? Whatever it was, word got out that Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson knew how to cook Middle Eastern cuisine, and folks thronged their stall Madcapra at L.A.’s Grand Central Market.
“Kismet” Copyright © 2024 by Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson. Photographs copyright © 2024 by Chris Bernabeo. Published by Clarkson Potter, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group.
L.A. is no stranger to all the iterations of this pan-national culinary tradition, thanks to its countless rotisserie chicken shops, shawarma joints, and falafel stands, so that’s saying something. It was at their second restaurant, Kismet, an airy proper sit-down restaurant in Los Feliz, where they truly established themselves as purveyors of a third wave of Middle-Eastern-Mediterranean-Californian cooking. Their follow-up, Kismet Rotisserie, raised the bar on a burnished spiced bird. At each of their spots they took their pan-cultural threads of dishes (labneh, za’atar, flaky malawach bread) and added that (yes) Alice Waters obsession with local and fresh vegetables, and served up shareable plates of the kind of bright and zippy plant-forward food you could eat for days: cucumber salad, fried cauliflower with caper yogurt, chile-dusted chicken skewers with radish salad, adorned with plenty of pickled vegetables and punchy versions of red and green zhoug.
Their new cookbook Kismet: Bright, Fresh, Vegetable-Loving Recipes empowers diners to bring that vegetable-obsessed, assertively flavored, celebratory ethos to their home kitchens. Packed with home-cook-friendly versions of their restaurant classics and dozens of other recipes, it’s a book that will serve you well on a weeknight or at a dinner party or potluck. As Sara and Sarah evocatively write in their introduction: “Imagine swiping a piece of just-off-the-grill flatbread through ranchy labneh, biting through the flakes of phyllo surrounding a lemony chicken-and-pine-nut pie, then locking eyes with a lamb meatball, an array of spiced pickles and vegetables awaiting your fork’s arrival. That’s the vibe.” Until you pick up a copy of their book, we’ve got four stellar recipes to cook now.
California/Mediterranean Favorites from Kismet
Can’t-Take-It-off-the-Menu Cucumber Salad
This salad’s enduring popularity on the Kismet menu proves, year after year, that cucumbers are universally loved. There are few fruits that won’t make a nice sidekick to bright, crisp cucumbers. If cherries aren’t in season, celebrate the fruit of the moment: We’ve cycled through mandarin oranges, melons, mulberries, and persimmons. As for rose water labneh, it’s the sauce you never knew you needed.
The Only Way to Bake a Salmon
This low-and-slow method is the way to bake a salmon—a little more time to dedicate, sure, but barely. Plus this salmon dish shines at any temp; it’s just as much a star set out cold for breakfast as it is served straight from the oven for dinner.
Perfect Smashed Potatoes
Simmer-smash-crisp, the holy trinity of root-vegetable cooking techniques, never fails to deliver. It strikes the ideal balance of soft interior and crunchy exterior—the texture dreams are made of and the ultimate crowd-pleaser. At times, we’ve topped these with a few swipes of dry-cured scallop, and if you, too, feel inclined toward a fishy flourish, bottarga (or even trout roe or caviar) would make a lovely stand-in, but it’s fully optional. It’s also worth noting that what we have here is yet another example where the finishing touch of raw garlic makes a good dish a little extra good.
Kismet Labneh
Kefir grains are the mysterious little fun-with-fermentation blobs that we use to culture fresh milk and cream into labneh. After several days, the dairy transforms, thickening and souring, at which point we remove the grains and drain off the liquid, resulting in the thick, spreadable kefir cheese known as labneh (or lebneh, lebni, or labaneh). The grains are endlessly reusable, and they continue to grow as you feed them (making them good gifts for fermentation-curious friends). Like any living thing, the grains need nourishment, so to keep them alive between batches, store them in milk in your fridge.
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