CLEVELAND — On Ohio City’s West 25th street, Nate’s Deli and Restaurant has been serving up Lebanese favorites and deli sandwiches and salads for over three decades, bringing one family’s cherished recipes to Northeast Ohio.
For owner Ghassan Maalouf, the restaurant is more than just a business, it’s a place where he’s spent endless hours, and where his mother’s Lebanese favorites are showcased and shared. His family originally bought the restaurant in 1987.
“I grew up here, basically I worked here in between school, college summers,” he said. “I've been here since the beginning.”
Maalouf’s family is originally from Lebanon and moved to Cleveland during a time of unrest in the country when he was about a year and a half old.
“So my whole family was born in Lebanon. I'm the youngest of three, we moved here in 1980,” he said. “There was a civil war going on in Lebanon, and my parents wanted a better life for their kids. So they packed us all up and moved here because we had some family existing here. So Cleveland was a natural landing spot for us.”
Though their family moved, they never lost touch with their Lebanese roots and the strong values of family and food that come with the culture. Maalouf describes the Lebanese community as “tight-knit,” with generations of families knowing each other, forming a “very close” community.
“Food is everything. I mean, growing up, it was my mom constantly shoving food down our throat,” Maalouf remembers. “And we weren't complaining, because it was always good food.”
Maalouf describes Lebanese food as familiar ingredients just prepared in a different way. For example, beef, lamb, and vegetables are staple items in the cuisine, often flavored with lemon, parsley, and a variety of spices.
“It's something that once you taste, it's like, ‘oh my gosh, where's this been my whole life?’” he said.
Popular dishes include Maalouf’s mother’s family recipes, salads like tabboulee, a mix of chopped parsley and tomatoes, onion, and bulgur wheat dressed with olive oil and lemon juice, or fattoush, made of lettuce, tomato, onion, and parsley with pita chips, oil and vinegar dressing, and flavored with garlic and sumac.
For something heartier, Nate’s also serves traditional grape leaves, each leaf meticulously stuffed with a rice and meat mixture, wrapped and rolled by hand, then cooked. There’s also Kibbee, finely minced lamb or beef mixed with cracked wheat and spiced, eaten cooked or raw, often spread over pita bread and paired with onion.
Dishes like grape leaves, Kibbee, and hummus, each made fresh and involving multiple steps, take time to prepare. But according to Maalouf, who wakes up at 4:30 a.m. every morning to begin early prep work in the restaurant by 5:30 a.m., it’s well worth it to make the dishes correctly.
“It's a lot of prep work, a lot of time-consuming work,” he said. “That's what makes the food so good, but it's worth it. That's how it has to be done. There are no good shortcuts to Lebanese food.”
Doing things the traditional way and by hand are crucial steps for Maalouf. He says his slew of regular customers are the ones who have helped support the business over the last decades.
“When you do things the right way and you get a good audience to follow you and they stick with you, you’ve got to stick with them and keep doing things the right way,” he said. “And I really think that’s made a big difference for us being here.”
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