A room with a view and a pie with a face

Dining out in Syria is certainly not for the faint-hearted - or fussy.

Menus are mostly in Arabic - and that’s if they even exist - but if the stars are shining down on you and you happen across one in ‘English’, the meal takes on a life of its own.

We‘ve so far had the pleasure of discovering ‘Chicken Soap’ - or ‘Cream Soap’ if you would prefer? -‘Jam and Cheese Pancake’ and the most exotic-sounding pie known to man.

This particular menu - the product of an ambient rooftop restaurant overlooking Damascus’s famous mosque, Umayyad - was transcribed literally into the Roman alphabet so made little more sense than Arabic.

So we enlisted the help of the waiter, who, in a thick, gummy accent, provided us with this description:

“So firsta we mix the wheeat wid the water and place it around the chopped lamb meeeat. Then we put it into the grrrill to cook. We then rrremove it from the grrrill and rrrub pomegranate in its face.”

When the dish finally appeared, which was little more than a tasty doner meat pie, it was distinctly lacking any pomegranate and, more disappointingly, it had no face - so far as we could see.

But after earlier polishing off our millionth kebab, anything remotely different was a pleasure so we gobbled it with gusto and soaked up the views of the glowing mosque.

And as we were wandering down the steps back into the winding alleys of the souq, as a final parting gift of hysterical laughter, we heard the waiter’s lilting voice carry over the distant call to prayer:

“…we then rrremove it from the grrrill and rrrub pomegranate in its face.”

We heard no laughter from the table of Japanese tourists so I assume it was a case of really lost in translation.