This is Pete Wells’s last review as restaurant critic for The Times. Read more about his 12 years of reviewing here.
Some restaurants are born when a young worker begins to feel more at home waiting tables or frying onions than any other place. Others start with dreams of stardom. Then there are restaurants that are opened by people who had no thought of cooking and serving food until the place they lived was taken over by men with guns.
Ala Al-Samawi, an owner and manager of a new restaurant in Brooklyn called Yemenat, was the creative director of his own design studio in Yemen’s capital, Sana, when the Houthi rebels seized control in 2014. The next year, when general chaos turned to personal threats, ..
