Rick steered us to the Middle Eastern enclave on Steinway Street in Astoria on a summer night in 2006. Our destination was an Egyptian restaurant called Eastern Nights. What follows is our experience on our night on Steinway Street.
Eastern Nights
2535 Steinway St
Astoria
The man with the Middle Eastern accent grumbled on the phone that the R Train-Steinway Street stop was the closest subway station to Eastern Nights, the Egyptian restaurant, assigned by Rick. When I got out of the station and onto Steinway, I began to walk west. My phone buzzed. It was Zio telling me that the address for the restaurant was a billiards club, not Eastern Nights. I looked at the address I had; the numbers had been inadvertently transposed. The restaurant was east of the subway station—I was going in the wrong direction. I waited in front of a Colombian bakery while Zio circled back to pick me up. I saw the Connecticut plates and hopped into the car, the sound of Zio’s precious pesticides splashing in their containers in the back. Steinway Street was as congested as the teeming alleys of Old Cairo and it was slow going with no sign of our destination. It wasn’t until we began seeing men sitting on folding chairs in front of cafes sucking on hookahs that we knew we were close.
We all arrived pretty much at the same time and were escorted into the back, under a big tent to a round table that was wet with water—the waiter joking with us that it had just rained, though we hadn’t had rain in days. There were a number of televisions suspended from the tent’s ceiling; a 1950’s black and white Egyptian romantic comedy was playing; the female lead looking a bit like Lucille Ball and not a head scarf in sight. The waiter mopped up the water and we sat and took a look at the menu. The first page was dominated by a variety of flavored teas and a separate hookah menu. We were in the back of the tent and in clear view of a large collection of hookahs that were maintained by a man whose only job was to maintain the hookahs, to blend the tobacco and light the coals. Inhaling tobacco with fruit flavors like apricot and mango would make for a unique experience, but we were here for the food, not the hookahs or the teas.
Hookahs
And the food was enough of an experience for us. So much so that our round table was just not big enough to hold all of it; the overworked waiter had to bring over a spare chair to use as a side table. Our unabashed excess drew looks from others in the restaurant, but nothing we weren’t used to. The feast began with fattoush, a cucumber, tomato salad followed by something called foul which turned out to be refried fava beans. A mound of warm pita bread was accompanied by a platter of hummus and baba ganoush, both swimming in olive oil.
Foul…but it really wasn’t.
A plate of grilled sausages, comprised mostly of casing stuffed with rice went alongside the hummus. Soon a platter of dry, tough and undernourished rabbit and duck crowded the table along with fatta, a stew made with a gamy lamb shank. Shrimp and calamari tajin, cooked in a crock and overwhelmed in a thick tomato sauce was squeezed onto the table as was a big plate where a whole grilled striped bass, cooked to perfect moistness was centered. We also had rice and something like rice with pieces of pita in it.
And then the pigeon arrived. Eastern Nights was the first restaurant of the many we had visited in almost four years that served the tiny, big city bird. It was magnificently presented; trussed lovingly—its tiny wings tied delicately together, a greasy glaze over its succulent skin. Zio looked at it and wondered if the chef has put a rub on it and if so, what could it be? The pigeon was stuffed with wheatberries and mint, which was a good thing because the meat on the tiny bird was scarce, to say the least. We picked at the pigeon, leaving the upper portion intact, its wings still tied together. That there would actually be something left to eat on our table was a rare occurrence in our outings, but at Eastern Nights, portions of the duck, rabbit and lamb tellingly remained. The striped bass, however was picked clean.
Urban poultry
Desserts were tempting and we would have liked to try them, but our waiter was scrambling from table to table, all alone in his work with the exception of the Hookah Man who was preparing the hookahs for use. Instead, we wandered across the street to a Middle Eastern café where we did our best to enjoy phyllo-wrapped sweets, but the Arabic newspaper prominently displayed in the café with its front page of color photos of the mutilated bodies of Lebanese children made dessert bittersweet to say the least.*
*Our visit to Steinway Street occurred during the peak of the Israeli/Lebanon conflict of 2006.
Searching the internet, I learned that Eastern Nights is now Eastern Nights Hookah Cafe. They have their own Facebook page which proclaims that it is also under new ownership and management. From Facebook I also learned that there is a DJ at the café Sunday through Friday nights and a belly dancer on Saturdays which, I’m sure, would make sucking on a hookah an almost pleasurable experience.
Fried Neck Bones...and some home fries 
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