Previte's restaurants serve food inspired by her extensive travels and the home-cooked Lebanese dishes of her childhood. Her new cookbook is Maydān: Recipes from Lebanon and Beyond.
Food Rose Previte, of D.C.'s Michelin star restaurant Maydān, releases her debut cookbook
TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. One of the first lessons restaurateur Rose Previte learned early in life was what she calls the secret code - the ways her family used food to hold on to culture. Previte grew up in a small town in Ohio eating almost exclusively home-cooked Lebanese dishes that were passed down from her great-grandparents who immigrated to the U.S. But as she writes in her new cookbook, "Maydan: Recipes From Lebanon And Beyond," it took a life-changing move to Russia for her to discover that following in her family's footsteps was her calling. In her new cookbook, which Bon Appetit recently named one of the best cookbooks of the year, Previte shares some of her family's tried and true recipes, as well as recipes from home cooks throughout the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Many of these recipes come from areas we often think of as conflict and war zones like Lebanon, Georgia, and Ukraine.
Previte owns four D.C. area restaurants - Compass Rose, which serves street food from around the world like Jamaican curried conch, Mexican tacos al pastor and Algerian vegetable tagine, the Kirby Club in Virginia, which specializes in kebabs, and the Michelin star-rated Maydan, which serves food from Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East. She also runs the neighboring cocktail bar Medina.
Rose Previte, welcome to FRESH AIR.
ROSE PREVITE: Thank you for having me. That was a kind introduction.
MOSLEY: Maydan is such a rich word because as we learn from you, it's a word that carries across regions and languages and it means the same thing.
PREVITE: I find it a really powerful word. And, you know, ironically, it is an Arabic word that I learned in Kyiv, Ukraine, which seems like not a place where you would hear a lot of Arabic. But as I was sightseeing while my husband was working back in, like, I guess it was 2009, I just kept hearing everyone say meet at the Maydan, meet at Maydan. And I came to find out it was sort of the slang, you know, or the colloquial, local way of saying, like, the main square, which I believe is Freedom or Independence Square, technically, but generically it's called Maydan. And so I looked into it a little bit more and realized in Tbilisi, Georgia, in Tehran, Iran, in all of these countries, the word is used in the exact same way to mean this kind of central gathering place. And I thought that was the power of what I wanted my restaurant spaces to be. You know, like where the food is very similar throughout a vast region but it's actually all the same at the end of the day.
MOSLEY: In this cookbook, we not only learn recipes from home kitchens that span across the Middle East and Eastern Europe, we also learn your origin story, how you came to this idea of bringing home kitchen food from the world into a restaurant setting, so I think it's best to start there because your journey started with a three-year stint in Russia beginning around 2009. And your husband is journalist David Greene, who folks may know as the former host of Morning Edition. At the time, he had gotten a job as a foreign correspondent in Russia. This was his dream job. But this is not - it was not part of your life plan.
PREVITE: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Absolutely. I don't know if any of my life plan went the way I expected after I met David, but (laughter) most of that is a very good thing, actually. We were living in New York City just one year exactly when he came home and said that there was an opening in the Moscow bureau. And nowhere in my whole life had I desired to live in Russia. But...
MOSLEY: Had you ever visited before?
PREVITE: Oh, heck no. No. I had done study abroad in the south of Spain, I traveled Europe and I had an amazing sense of adventure, and the travel bug had 100% bit me after that study abroad experience. So I wanted the adventure. I wasn't quite 30 years old, we didn't have kids, so logically, I could justify the decision, right? And, you know, I was also probably overly confident that study abroad had prepared me for Moscow because it didn't. I assure you, nothing prepares you for that. And I also think I underestimated the difficulty of not knowing the language before we went. Nothing I anticipated - and probably that's why we went, 'cause had I realized how hard everything would be, I might not have agreed.
MOSLEY: You would have said no right away.
PREVITE: Yeah.
MOSLEY: The thing, as well, was that you had a career that you were headed towards in public policy.
