Eat
Shababi Chicken. Photo by Farrah Skeiky.
Shababi Chicken Pop-Up Lets Chef-Owner Marcelle Afram Dig Deeper into His Heritage
January 25, 2023 @ 12:00pm
Shababi Chicken chef-owner Marcelle Afram says he’s unapologetically bringing his entire self to his Palestinian-inspired pop-up that opens Thursday, January 26.
Afram’s immigrant parents, who hail from Syria and Lebanon, once owned several pizza and sub shops and two diners in Maryland. He remembers they downplayed Arabian flavors in their cuisine, thinking it would help them assimilate.
“I don’t place judgment on them for it,” Afram says. “I certainly have an immense amount of privilege and I could never understand [their struggles] on a personal level. It’s scary, and also it’s a lot, to explain to people constantly where you’re from, what you are, what is this. So I think it was just easier for them to dilute it along the way.”
Afram, formerly executive chef of the Michelin-starred Maydan and its sister restaurant, Compass Rose, is launching a five-week dinner series at Please Bring Chips, a catering and events services company Afram has collaborated with in the past. The dinners will run from Thursday, January 26 through Saturday, February 25 at Please Bring Chips’ headquarters.
The dinners are a reclamation for Afram, because their flavors won’t be diluted and the cuisine is inspired by his heritage.
Afram is a grandson of Palestinian refugees whom he says were expelled from their homes in 1948. His father’s family relocated to Syria while his mother’s family moved to Lebanon. His parents and grandparents left those countries in the 1970s and moved to the United States. His father’s family moved to the D.C. area, while his mother’s family settled in New Jersey.
“I have this upbringing that is so many generations removed from the source that I’m trying to represent,” Afram says, explaining why he calls his cuisine “Palestinian-inspired.” “I’m pulling from the flavors that I grew up with, the flavors that my community’s educated me on, the flavors that I want people to understand.”
At the heart of the dinner is Afram’s shababi chicken, inspired by two things: Palestine’s national dish, musakhan — a slow-roasted chicken rubbed in allspice and sumac — and the rotisserie chicken of the West Bank Palestine is known for.
The za’atar fries, house-cut French fries that Afram dusts with za’atar, is another dish he’s passionate about. He secured the spice from Z&Z, a Palestinian-American family-owned company in Rockville. The family’s blend, in turn, is produced in collaboration with Palestinian farmers, Afram says.
The pop-up goes beyond the family-style menu by offering several items a la carte, including a pistachio-topped knafeh waffle. It’s a sweet, cheese pastry served warm and soaked in rose and orange blossom syrup. Afram will pair it with mastic ice cream (“bouza” in Arabic).
“Shababi” is Arabic for “my youthful people.” And the expression “yalla shababi” summons everyone to gather, whether it’s for musakhan dinner or backgammon.
The opening of the pop-up marks the first time diners can enjoy Shababi Chicken’s cuisine as a sit-down experience. In January 2021, Afram — also an alum of Oyamel, Bluejacket and the now-closed Potenza — launched Shababi Chicken as a takeout operation. He paused that September to find a brick-and-mortar space for Shababi Diner, a spinoff of the Shababi Chicken concept.
He eventually walked away from lengthy lease negotiations toward the end of 2022, saying he didn’t connect with the space or the landlord. After that, he decided to revamp the Shababi Chicken concept by adding private dinners and doing different iterations of the pop-up.
“It is really a passion project that I’ve been working on for a lot of years that’s in tune to my upbringing and my parents’ own diners, and tying in my first-generation experience in all of that,” Afram says. “In relaunching Shababi after these lease negotiations, this opportunity came up with Please Bring Chips and it just made total sense.”
Afram’s pop-up, a collaboration between Shababi Chicken and Please Bring Chips, will run January 26 to February 25 at 1320 H Street Northeast. For more information and to make a reservation, click here.
Shababi Chicken: shababichicken.com // @shababidc
Please Bring Chips: 1320 H St. NE, DC; pleasebringchips.com // @pleasebringchips
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