Ian McNulty: With hot pita, long-lived Middle Eastern restaurant Byblos takes a step up

Any restaurant with hummus as the centerpiece will have pita playing at least a strong supporting role. At the latest version of Byblos, that dynamic has come full circle with hot pita bread now a starting point for any meal.

Byblos has been serving hummus and pita from back in the era when this could still count as an exotic restaurant menu find.

The local brand got started in 1994. The city had Middle Eastern restaurants then, of course, but Byblos brought a style just a notch nicer than the mom-and-pops of the day. Across a succession of locations through the years, the brand introduced many to the cornerstone flavors of this broad and varied cuisine.

New Orleans now has a much wider fluency in this cuisine, going beyond the standards common around the Middle East and delving into the regional differences that really distinguish it.

Last spring, Byblos opened a new location in Elmwood, taking over the shopping center spot that had been home to the Mexican restaurant Nacho Mama’s. The menu here is streamlined compared with earlier Byblos incarnations, more firmly focused on Middle Eastern flavors, and its centerpiece is a dome-shaped oven making pita bread to order.

Moments matter when it comes to hot bread, especially pita, the way these little loaves can capture a puff of aromatic air from the oven and carry it to the table.

That doesn’t happen with even the best examples if they’re baked somewhere besides the restaurant, or even if they’re allowed to sit for just a few minutes.

So at this new Byblos, pita is fired off to order, a two-minute process from a disk of dough to a hot orb ready to rip open roughly and run through the dips and wrap around the various grilled meats on your table.

Fresh bread rising

Adding in-house bread is, in a way, a recognition of evolving tastes and interests in Middle Eastern flavors by one of the longest-lived of its local purveyors. A game-changer came with the wood-burning ovens issuing forth puffy, beautifully char-marked pita at the dueling Uptown modern Israeli restaurants Saba (5757 Magazine St., 504-324-7770) and Shaya (4213 Magazine St., 504-891-4213) — this one soon to expand to Covington with sibling restaurant TAVI.

Other restaurants have shown the appeal of their own specialty bread, like the wonderfully crisp namesake saj bread at Saj (4126 Magazine St., 504-766-0049) that I can’t stop eating whenever I visit and the thicker, diamond-shaped samoon bread from the brick oven at Almasgoof (5024 W. Esplanade Ave., Metairie, 504-308-3600), the Iraqi restaurant in Metairie I can’t stop thinking about.

Byblos co-owner Tarek Tay said he’s wanted to add a pita oven for years, though retrofitting the existing locations proved problematic. When plans began for the Elmwood restaurant, though, the pita oven was designed as a centerpiece from the start.

“It’s the way we do it back home,” he said, referring to his native Lebanon. “It makes it completely different, and this is what I’ve wanted to be able to do.”

There are now three Byblos locations, and each varies. The original on Metairie Road still serves its long menu of both deep-running Middle Eastern standards and dishes clearly there for crossover appeal. The same menu that has stuffed cabbage rolls and mujadarah, a homey stew of lentils and rice and onions, also fields baby back ribs with fries and lasagna.

Byblos Market fills its own niche in Metairie as a specialty grocery and Middle Eastern deli. It’s indispensable for a quick shawarma wrap or a more homestyle plate from the hot bar, and maybe a bottle of rosewater to make that Lebanese iced tea at home (which, in my experience, is just as likely to become a home cocktail ingredient anyway — it’s an easy way to fancy up your next gin and tonic).

This Elmwood location of Byblos has a contemporary look, a large bar that’s good for solo dining, and a covered patio with plants that disguise the view of a shopping center parking lot. There's a big-screen TV and the promise of more of that hot pita bread.

That bread changes even during a single course. From the first tear you take, emitting all the steam, the texture will can go from pliant to more crisp and brittle and then to something closer to a cracker by the time you’re finishing it off.

If you’re like me, you’ll want to order a fresh batch with each dish that arrives.

Byblos

1000 S. Clearview Pkwy., Elmwood, 504-766-9785; and 1501 Metairie Road, Metairie, 504-834-9773

Byblos Market

2020 Veterans Blvd., Metairie, 504-837-9777

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