Ima: Forty Years of Kurdish Kubbeh at the End of Agrippas

The soup arrives before anything else is settled, before the coats are off the backs of the chairs, before anyone has decided what else to order. Kubbeh matfunia, the pumpkin one: broth the color of late afternoon, thick with carrot and celery leaf and ribbons of Swiss chard, and sunk somewhere in the middle of it a semolina dumpling the size of a small fist. Break it with the side of a spoon and it releases minced beef, warm and faintly sweet. Around you the room is loud in the way a family kitchen is loud. Somebody's grandchildren are negotiating over the last stuffed vine leaf. A waiter carries four plates on one arm. Outside the window, Agrippas Street runs out of numbers and turns into HaRav Shmuel Baruch. This is Ima, and it has been doing exactly this since 1981.

Miriam Binyamin opened Ima in 1981 with the recipes she carried from a Kurdish household, the ones that came out of the borderland where Iraq, Iran and Turkey meet. She cooked them herself for decades, then taught them to a kitchen that has kept them without editing. She has since retired from daily service and her son Yaron runs the restaurant, but the menu still reads like an inventory of what she brought with her.