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Eater
6 days ago
- Eater
Inside Karravaan, D.C.'s Stunning New Tribute to the Silk Road
The Silk Road has a new stop in Union Market. Indian chef Sanjay Mandhaiya, the creative force behind 14th Street's Pappe, unveils an all-new culinary endeavor across town on Thursday, June 19. Karravaan celebrates various cultural influences along the popular trading route, with Persian, Portuguese, Indian, and Turkish cuisines served under the same roof (325 Morse Street NE). Unlike Pappe, which Mandhaiya notes is a distinctly Indian restaurant, the goal with Karravaan was to be more regionally focused. 'We're celebrating dishes that were connected by the Silk Road,' he says. The critical trade network connected Eastern and Western cultures for over a millennia between 30 BCE to 1453 CE, says Mandhaiya. Given the multiplicity of countries and cuisines the Silk Road touched, Karravaan's menu is as ambitious as it is far-reaching. That journey begins with bread service. Both Indian naan and Persian barbari are served in unlimited quantities, and represent two different takes on flatbread. Naan, he notes, was actually brought to India through the Silk Road. 'When it came to India, our ancestors decided they wanted to use baking powder and baking soda in place of yeast, whereas the Persian version is leavened with yeast,' he says. The theme continues in an extensive selection of passed plates, which include jamon-wrapped dates combining classic Spanish and Moroccan ingredients alongside Tibetan momos, traditional pork, and vegetable dumplings. 'We have a smokey eggplant dip, which is a Persian dish we wanted to do with Indian flair,' says Mandhaiya. Italian eggplants are caramelized along with onions, then blended with labneh and pinenuts for a beautiful texture. Khachapuri was a 'must-have on the menu,' Mandhaiya notes, referring to the classic Georgian dish comprising a bread boat filled with cheese and a freshly cracked egg. Karravaan's version also features roasted jalapeños for some added heat. D.C. just lost a longstanding destination for khachapuri when Shaw's Compass Rose closed last month. Classic chickpea falafel get a touch of ginger for added heat and brightness (and some Indian influence as well). 'Anytime food comes from one place to another it's ultimately dictated by the regionally available ingredients,' says Mandhaiya. In India, he says, you'll generally find rice dishes with a lot of spices, whereas in Afghanistan, you'll find a lot of cashews and dried berries in nuts.' This is reflected in Karravaan's wild mushroom biryani, which combines wild hunt mushrooms with raisins and richly spiced grains. A playful combination also comes to life in the fettuccine a la goshtaba, which takes the classic Kashmiri lamb curry of goshtaba and combines it with a fennel beurre blanc, parmesan cheese, and tellicherry pepper. 'We're really trying to drive home the fact that we have something for everyone – our target clientele really is anyone from any culture or background,' Mandhaiya says. As such, you'll find everything from a French chicken liver mousse to a Chinese-influenced duck breast served with a North African harissa-honey soy reduction. Larger dishes, meant to be shared family style, include a seasonal sabzi tagine, served in its eponymous cooking vessel. 'We wanted to serve the classic Moroccan dish in the classic Moroccan way, with its hit on top to trap all the flavor,' Mandhaiya says. The lamb shank polov is also meant to feed a family, drawing inspiration from Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Persia with its braised lamb shank, candied carrots, and raisins. Even drink options reflect a multitude of influences. For example, the Terracotta Warrior pairs Chinese spirit baiju with orange bitter wine, amaro and citrus, while the namesake martini is a vodka martini laced with saffron and baharat, a North African aromatic spice blend. The notion of taking diners on a journey is paramount at Karravaan, and it's not lost upon Mandhaiya that the restaurant is located not too far from the old train tracks of Union Station. A railway motif proliferates across the restaurant, from the train-platform ceiling design to the open kitchen design meant to evoke the look of a parked train car. 'At Karravaan, we're hoping to reunite people through cuisine,' Mandhaiya notes. 'I want to show people that at the end of the day, we're the same people eating the same things.' See More: DC Restaurant Openings Eater Inside
Rakyat Post
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Rakyat Post
Knowing The History Of Israel-Palestine: Zionism And Its Myths
Subscribe to our FREE This article first appeared in The state of Israel founded itself on a secular ideology, Zionism. Zionism, as Ilan Pappe explains in Ten Myths About Israel, was a secular ideology born out of Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe in the mid-1800s. It sought to redefine the religion of Judaism into a national movement at a time when new national movements were mushrooming in Europe. Importantly, Zionism was also driven by a search for safety by Jews long persecuted in Europe. The solution: colonise the land of Palestine to return the Jews to where they had been expelled by the Romans in AD 70. Zionism benefited from a few factors that gave it such prominence as to become the foundational ideology of the state of Israel in 1948. Its objective of colonising the land of Palestine coincided with the British strategic imperial impulse to deepen involvement in the 'Holy Land', thus receiving the British government's support. That was no small matter as Britain was the imperial power of the world at the time. That support resulted in the infamous Balfour Declaration of November 1917 to establish in Palestine a national home for the Jewish people. As Rashid Khalidi points out in The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, the soft, deceptive diplomatic language used in the declaration did not even mention explicitly the then 94% Arab Palestinian majority, referring only to them as 'non-Jewish'. This tendency to erase and 'unrecognise' the indigenous Palestinians continues to this day. Ominously, the declaration promised only 'civil and religious rights' to the native population but no political or national rights. The die was thus cast – unjustly and inequitably – and we continue to see the consequences today. Britain's imperial role in the genesis of the Israel-Palestine conflict is highly significant. After World War One, Britain was assigned a 'mandate' over Palestine and its charter incorporated wholesale, the 1917 Balfour Declaration. As Pappe observes in Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the British Mandate thus embraced 'Britain's promise to the Zionist movement to secure a 'homeland' for the Jews in Palestine'. Zionism's quest to colonise a land also fit into the practice of the day – go forth and colonise if you are of a dominant European power. The idea of Zionist Jews settling in and colonising the land of Palestine thus seemed all of a piece. Importantly too, as Pappe explains in Ten Myths About Israel, Zionism coincided with the view of significant groups of European Christians and Jews that the colonisation of Palestine was an act of return and redemption – part of a divine scheme for the return, resurrection and second coming of the Messiah. The Zionist project also found alignment with Europe's own long history of antisemitism and ideas of transferring Jews from Europe to Palestine. In fact, Pappe also points to the role of an element of Islamophobia in David Lloyd George's preference for a Jewish colony in the Holy Land instead of a Muslim one. This was how George, the UK's Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922, saw the Palestinians. Add to that, the matter of Europe's own need to compensate its Jews for the Nazi Holocaust (a genocide of white Europeans in the heart of Europe), and we have a powerful confluence of factors. These have led to the ongoing Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine at the expense of native Palestinians. All because of a genocide of Jews in the Holocaust in Europe, which the native Palestinians had nothing to do with. Zionist myths One of the main props to justify the colonisation of Palestine is the myth, strengthened by repetition, that Palestine was effectively empty before the arrival of the Zionist settlers (who thus came and 'made the desert bloom'). Related to this was the idea that Palestinians simply did not exist. This was patently untrue. In fact, Pappe describes how the Zionist leaders knew it was not empty even before the first Zionist settlers arrived in 1882. An early delegation sent to Palestine reported back (in rather patriarchal terms) that 'the bride is beautiful but married to another man'. In fact, there was already a Palestinian existence 'manifested in the customs of the people, their Arabic dialect, and shared history'. There were already a few hundred thousand Muslim, Christian and Jewish Palestinians before the first wave of Zionist Jewish migration beginning in 1882. In his Hundred Years' War, Rashid Khalidi speaks of his family library in Jerusalem. (Joe Biden was photographed walking out of a bookshop on Nantucket Island with a copy of Rashid's book under his arm. To what avail – a dubious question, unfortunately.) The Khalidi Library in the Old City of Jerusalem was founded in 1899 by Rashid's grandfather, with a bequest from Rashid's grandfather's mother. Private libraries were, evidently, a practice among the city's oldest families. The library housed thousands of manuscripts, books and papers. Clearly, Palestine was neither empty nor thinly inhabited by a backward people who had to await the arrival of Zionist settlers to 'make the desert bloom'. And yet, the rallying slogan of Zionism was 'A land without a people for a people without a land'. This was a false statement that helped underpin the idea of 'Eretz Israel' ('Land of Israel'). Given this falsehood, one would ask if it shouldn't instead be 'Ersatz Israel' (substitute or artificial version of Israel)? Pappe's The Idea of Israel relates an interesting story of how Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, was prepared to manufacture 'truths' out of expediency. In 1937, he asked a leading Zionist historian of the time to produce research to prove continuous Jewish occupation of the region from AD 70 (the time of the Roman exile) to 1882, when the first Zionists arrived. Ben-Gurion, the then leader of the Jewish community, needed the report before the arrival in two weeks of the Britain's Peel Commission, which was charged with finding a solution to the conflict already brewing in Palestine. The Zionist historian said he could, but he would need about a decade to do so. Ben-Gurion told him, 'You do not understand. The Peel Commission is coming in two weeks' time. Reach your conclusion by then, and afterwards you can have a whole decade to prove it!' Through the vagaries of history, people move from place to place. And when, for whatever reason, a people should come to re-inhabit a place where they were, it cannot be right for that to be done by the appropriation, killing and forceful displacement of other people who have also or subsequently inhabited it. Especially not if the appropriating group are a people such as the Jews who have suffered their own long history of persecution and expulsion, and thus know what that is like. Especially not if in the tradition of that people (Judaism), there are powerful tenets exhorting justice, compassion and humanity – which cruel acts of killing and forceful displacement would surely transgress. Such contradictions only 'make sense' when we remember that Zionism, a nationalist political ideology, is not Judaism. (Thus, being critical of Zionism is not being antisemitic, as Zionism does not define Jewishness.) -by By Tong Veng Wye, Aliran member. Read Part 1: Read Part 2: Share your thoughts with us via TRP's . 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