Scrumptious Hummus

There are a lot of restaurants that serve hummus, but only a few get it right

By Jody Jaffe 

Yeah, yeah, yeah—that’s what we thought when Pete Kotsatos said his restaurant, Athenian Plaka, had the best hummus in town.

Turns out he was right. Sort of.  I don’t know if he has the best hummus in town, but he certainly had the best hummus that we—myself and my two chef-tasters, Lydia Schlosser and Susan Watterson—tasted among the nine Bethesda and Rockville restaurants we visited.

“This is the kind that you can eat a whole plate of instead of two spoonfuls and then say, ‘I’m done,’” says Watterson, an instructor at L’Academie de Cuisine in Gaithersburg and Bethesda. “It’s not over-garlicky or over-sesame-y. That’s what makes it really dense.”

Watterson knows her hummus. “We used to make it a lot at school because it is quick and easy,” she says. “We also ate a lot of it during our South Beach Diet phase.”

There you have it, the two big reasons why hummus has been around since humans have been hunting and gathering; it’s easy and packs a protein wallop. In fact, hummus has been around for so long, no one knows exactly where it originated.

Surely somewhere in the Middle East, given that the word “hummus” is Arabic for chickpea, which is called garbanzo in Spanish, ceci in Italian, gram in India and Cicer arietinum in science.

Chickpeas were cultivated 7,000 years ago in the Middle East. But there’s evidence that our ancestors have been eating them for tens of thousands of years. Some think the Phoenicians brought the chickpea to Western Europe. This much is certain though, by Roman times, chickpeas were part of the diet. Consequently, the history of hummus is murky, with several cultures claiming origin.

In our tasting travels, we discovered that hummuses are like snowflakes, no two are alike. This surprised us because it’s not as if hummus is a complicated food. You’ve got your basic four ingredients: chickpeas, tahini, garlic and lemon. Five, if you decide to get wild and crazy, and add a dash of cumin for an extra kick.

It’s all a matter of proportion, which Kyriacos Photiou understands well. He’s the chef at Athenian Plaka on Woodmont Avenue in Bethesda. He uses a hummus recipe he learned 35 years ago when he was in cooking school in Cyprus. With one minor modification.

 “I’ll tell you a funny story about that,” he says. A few years back, he was a personal chef for a client who had a professional need for inoffensive breath. The client loved the hummus, but not the hummus breath. So she asked him to cut down the garlic and emulsify it in oil before he mixed it with the chickpeas, tahini and lemon. “Now I use about half the garlic (from the original recipe),” he says.

The result is a lemony-light hummus with a whisper of garlic and an undertone of tahini. Perfect, we all agree.

“The lemon hits the strongest note, but it doesn’t overpower it,” says Schlosser, who is the registrar at L’Academie in Bethesda and a former pastry chef at the former Café Bethesda.

Hummus comes in a variety of consistencies: pasty, chunky, creamy, viscous and, at its worst, watery. This one is on the viscous side, not too creamy and not too chunky. This is a good thing because when there’s a hummus misstep it usually comes in the form of consistency. Some of the hummuses we tasted were so creamy, it was like eating air. Plus, they just about slid off the pita. Others were thick enough to double as mortar. 

I compliment Photiou on both the flavor and texture of his hummus. He smiles and says he boils his chickpeas, rather than using canned. “I’m impressed,” Schlosser says. Me too, since I once tried to boil chickpeas and wound up with little leather balls.

 “Did you salt your water?” Schlosser asks me after I tell her about my chickpea misadventure.

Yes, it seems, is the wrong answer.

 “You shouldn’t be salting any bean water, it makes them tough,” Schlosser says.

This is why it pays to know cooking teachers. So, I ask them, do fresh-boiled chickpeas make better hummus than canned chickpeas? “I’m going to try it that way tonight,”

Schlosser says. “Ask me that question tomorrow.”

Athenian Plaka was our sixth stop on the hummus hunt. We’d started at Levante’s, the chic Turkish restaurant around the corner from the Bethesda Barnes & Noble. The hummus here is pleasant and creamy. No overpowering punch of garlic or heavy weight of tahini.

What makes this stop on the hummus hunt a must, however, is the bread: a flat bread they make in a wood-fired oven. And the prices. Levante’s is the home of the $2 Happy Hour Hummus from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Next we went to the Lebanese restaurant Bacchus on Norfolk Avenue. It doesn’t get much more authentic than here, unless you take a plane to Beirut. “How many places can you find a camel table?” Watterson says of the glass-topped table with a camel-shaped base in the foyer. Inside, the walls are whitewashed stucco, and there are Middle Eastern tapestries, copper plates and strings of blown glass. Six Middle Eastern women speaking Arabic occupy the center table.

The waiter brings us three different bowls of hummus. One comes topped with chopped beef and pine nuts, another with fava beans and the last with whole chickpeas. To our amazement, Bacchus has done the unimaginable—made hummus pretty. “You can’t dress it up or take it out,” Watterson says. “It’s beige.”

Instead of the traditional white plates that the other restaurants serve their hummus on, Bacchus uses little brown earthenware bowls that look like they were bought in a village market. And the sprinkled-on toppings take care of the beige problem.

The basic hummus here is good, with a consistency that isn’t too anything. It falls closer to chunky than smooth and it’s not overly pasty. The flavors are well balanced, like a chorus with no solo singers. However, there is a subtle spice after-kick. The chefs here have gone beyond the basic four ingredients. Perhaps a little cumin? Or maybe, Watterson says, something called zaatar, a Middle Eastern spice made of thyme, sesame and sumac.

What elevates this hummus are the toppings. All three of us like the chopped beef, which has a pomegranate tartness to it.

“This is where you come with a group of people,” says Schlosser. “This is festive. And if you’re hummused out, this is a nice change of pace.”

Next stop: around the corner to the Tel-Aviv Café. If you like your hummus with a strong tahini flavor, this is the place for you. Or if you like your hummus with belly dancers, this is it. They’ve got one every Saturday night. We especially liked the pita, which comes grilled, and the Altoids dispenser by the front door.

“That’s if you think the hummus is too strong,” says Schlosser. Or if you’ve hummused at the Persian restaurant, Paradise, on Wisconsin Avenue in Bethesda.  The waiter here explains that 98 percent of their menu is Persian, a cuisine known for its mild flavors. Then he brings us a bowl of hummus, with warm pita.

We take a bite and KAPOW!!!—we’re hit upside the head with enough garlic to keep Dracula at bay. The hummus, the waiter further explains, is from the other 2 percent of the menu, the Afghani side. It seems that several years ago, a then-partner at Paradise was from Afghanistan and some of the recipes have stayed on, like the hummus.

We try another bite and fan our mouths. We all agree that some people will like this assertive hummus. However, this is not the place to come before a business meeting. “Where are the Altoids when you need them?” Watterson says. “I don’t even want to talk on the phone.”

On our next hummus hunt day, we head for Rockville. Watterson is starting a new class at L’Academie and can’t join us. So Schlosser’s daughter, Lucy, brings us back up to a trio of tasters. She’s a senior at Walter Johnson High School and she loves hummus.

The Original Ambrosia Restaurant on Rockville Pike is the place to go with a hungry teenager on her way to a soccer match. You get a lot of bang for your buck here. The hummus comes on a large white plate, dotted with five olives, and served with a small Greek salad on the side and lots of pita points. “The bread’s good,” says Lucy. “It’s crispy on the outside.”

She also likes the hummus. And so do we. “This is more flavorful than some of the others,” Schlosser says. We guess there’s a hit of cumin and the waiter confirms this. Any other spices, I ask? He smiles and says something about a state secret.

Our last stop is Lebanese Taverna in Rockville, where you order your food at a counter, but the restaurant has a sit-down feel. The hummus is served in a small (very small) cobalt blue bowl. It comes sprinkled with parsley, paprika and a squirt of olive oil. Many of the restaurants added a shake of paprika, probably to address hummus’ beige problem. This led to a culinary question that’s been on my mind for years. Does paprika have a job in life other than adding color? Does it actually have a taste?

“Not much of one,” Schlosser says. “In this country, we use it mostly for color.”

 The hummus here is on the creamy side, with a hint of lemon. Again, it’s the bread that steals the show. The pita comes puffed in perfect little pillows that, when pierced, let out a small gust of hot, doughy air. We all wonder how they get the air to stay inside. The pita maker shows us the trick—a large Toastmaster conveyer belt oven. The oval of white dough goes in one end flat as a pancake and comes out the other end a couple minutes later puffed high.

“This testing came at a good time for me, because of my upcoming class in Jewish cooking,” Schlosser says. The class, “Brisket and Kugel and Tzimmes, Oy Vey,” will feature Schlosser’s hummus. The one she used to like.

“I don’t even like mine anymore, because I liked the one at Athenian Plaka. Mine is not up to par anymore, because I tasted his.”

Jody Jaffe is the author of Thief of Words and Shenandoah Summer, and teaches journalism at Georgetown University.