Golan Heights – comfort food for the kosher crowdby Adam Garrett-Clark It’s amazing how much you can fit inside of a pita – a fist full of barbecued chicken, Israeli salad (cubed tomatoes and cucumbers), blood red beets and spiced onions all tucked in over a bed of hummus and French fries. At Golan Heights, the kosher grill on Amsterdam Avenue near W. 187th Street, stuffing pitas is a daily operation. The small shop next to Yeshiva University serves typical Israeli food adapted to American tastes, thriving on its busy crowd of students each day.  Favorites like the shawarma, falafel, and kebab share a menu with more “New World” items like teriyaki chicken and the hot dog. The restaurant has also developed a few of its own dishes, including the beloved “Zaidis,” chicken nuggets served in either a hot buffalo wing sauce or a sweet sesame glaze. Zaidi’s are so popular they are now ordered in large batches for Shabbat, the Jewish holy day, even from addresses downtown, according to manager, Benjamin Izsak.
For the summer, Golan Heights has developed a quinoa salad, which is a hit with the teachers in the area. The South American grain is served tabouli style with tomatoes, peppers and cilantro. Everyday at lunchtime the restaurant is flooded with high schoolers from Yeshiva University High School for Boys across the street. Roughly 30 boys blast through the doors, Izsak said, “almost pushing through the salad bar.” Late nights are the domain of Yeshiva University students, who frequent the kosher grill for a bite after a study session in the library or on the weekends to cap a night on the town. Officially the restaurant is open until 2 a.m. every day except for Friday, reopening after sundown on Saturdays for Shabbat. But its reputation as a late night munchies station has kept the store open well into 5 a.m. on a festive Thursday or Saturday night. Students like it because of the large portions. Any order, from a shawarma to falafel, can be ordered in either a pita, laffa (larger flat bread almost like a wrap) or on a plate which comes with rice or French fries, salad and a pita. The most popular is the laffa, which looks almost like a foot long sub once stuffed. Servers slice the massive laffa in half, allowing the less famished to save half for later in the dorms. As college can be a time of indecision, many customers, according to Izsak, order their laffas in what is called “hetzi hetzi” (half and half in Hebrew) style. The most popular combination is a laffa filled with half shawarma and half schnitzel, a chicken cutlet fried in a sesame seed breadcrumb batter. Normally a laffa or pita is spread with hummus, then layered with French fries, before it is filled with meat and a variety of vegetables from the salad bar. To complete these creations Golan Heights offers several homemade sauces.  Izsak recommends the drizzling of three sauces for a classic shawarma experience: Tahini, a typical Middle Eastern sauce made of sesame seeds; Harif, a popular Golan Heights original made with Mexican hot peppers; and Ambar, another traditional sauce in Israel made of pickled mango. The ambar sauce, golden in hue, has a clear sour taste with just a hint of bitterness at the end.
Izsak estimates about 80 percent of the clientele is Jewish. The rest of their regular customers come from the surrounding neighborhood or work at the high school further north on Amsterdam Avenue. Many in the neighborhood know the restaurant because of the dynamic personality of its owner, Dave Barak, who most know as “Dudik.” According to Izsak, Dudik, now on vacation in Israel, is the driving force that keeps the business afloat. “He’s very Israeli style,” Izsak said, describing him as a Washington Heights version of the famous character on the Seinfeld sitcom, the Soup Nazi. If you ask him for extra fries or a healthier portion of meat he might verbally stuff you in the pita, but he can also be very sweet if you treat him correctly, Izsak said. “He’s a little extreme.” The Manhattan Times is the bilingual newspaper of Washington Heights and Inwood.
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