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On the Menu In Baghdad, Fresh Hopes
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He settled in Sulaymaniyah, a city in the semiautonomous Kurdish region that has been relatively free of violence. He was not happy to discover another restaurant called Qadori, selling the very dishes he once sold. He took the owners to court, where he won the case, but he eventually allowed the restaurant owner to use the name for an additional three months. He also let one of his employees open a Qadori restaurant in Syria.
He waited for the moment he could reopen in Baghdad.
That moment arrived in April 2007. The news of Qadori's resurrection spread across the capital. Baghdadis told each other how to get to the new location.
Today, the smell of raw fat melting on frying pans wafts through the restaurant.
Hussein, who is 70, can hardly speak. He walks slowly from table to table, his shoulders sloped forward, greeting customers, especially the regulars. His staff has grown to 27 employees.
On this day, Ayad Kadhum, a 29-year-old clothing store owner, sat in the restaurant eating makhlamah.
He remembered when as a child he visited Qadori's restaurant in Bab al-Sheik with his uncle. "I was so small that I couldn't finish a single omelet," Kadhum said. The meals became a Friday morning ritual.
In recent years, whenever Kadhum traveled to Syria on business, he frequented the Qadori restaurant there, along with crowds of Iraqis who had fled the violence gripping their homeland.
It wasn't quite right. "Even though it was practically the same staff, it did not have the same taste as it does here in Baghdad," Kadhum said.
Another customer, Abdul Qadir Abdul Kareem, sat with five friends. The Sunni government worker said he had been worried about coming because the new restaurant is in an area long controlled by Shiite militias.
"Now the place is safe, but this area used to be sectarian," said Abdul Kareem, who lost a friend in the 2005 bombing. He pointed to his friends, Sunnis and Shiites, sitting together.
One of them, Saif Kamil, a wholesale sweets merchant, waited for his meal. "The killing time is over," he said. "The situation is better."
