The first thing you see when you walk in the door at Sawa, a new Lebanese restaurant in Park Slope, is not a host stand or a little vestibule to hover in while you wait for your table. Instead, you are greeted with a pane of glass, behind which a cook stands at a flour-dusted countertop pulling and portioning glossy blobs of blond dough. Every few moments, the pieces of dough are transferred to a great round bread oven hulking just beyond.
It’s tiled in jade and white, and circular, with a chimney at the center of its domed ceiling—the best sort of oven for firing rounds of pita, drawing heat up and around in a blistering vortex. When a ball of dough hits the oven, it begins to inflate nearly instantly, its stretchy, well-proofed exterior holding in all the newly formed steam, which poofs and puffs into the bread’s famous internal pocket. Release comes only once it’s hit your table: tear open the pale balloon of bread, and steam puffs out in a white cloud of yeasty exhalation.
Most meals at Sawa begin with the bread, a sizable round of which comes with any of the restaurant’s selection of Middle Eastern dips: a bright swirl of labneh, thick and tangy and strewn with olives and za’atar; a magenta whorl of muhammara, sweet and smoky with charred red peppers and walnuts; a dense, garlicky hummus, which you can get topped with a dizzyingly savory dollop of braised beef cheeks, the meat as velvet-soft as the hummus itself. Sawa, which opened in April, is owned by a pai.
