Café Aladdin has been on the same stretch of South 12th Street for over a decade, and most people who live ten minutes away have never walked through the door.
I found it the way a lot of people do — somebody dragged me there. My neighbor Barb, who grew up in Bismarck and has opinions about everything, told me she’d been going on Sunday mornings since around 2010. She said it mattered that the owner, Fawzi, actually cooked your food. I didn’t know what she meant until I went.
Fawzi Alahmad has run Café Aladdin for years with a straightforwardness that makes the place feel more like a home kitchen than a restaurant. He’s usually behind the counter when you walk in. The room is small — maybe eight or nine tables — and the walls are hung with a mix of Middle Eastern art and handwritten specials on a whiteboard. It is not fancy. The chairs don’t match. The coffee comes in a white diner mug.
The menu covers Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking, and Fawzi does most of it himself. The shawarma plate is the thing I keep coming back to — chicken or beef, sliced thin and piled over rice with a cucumber-tomato salad and a tahini sauce that has some actual acidity to it, not just the sweet, diluted kind. The hummus is made in-house and it shows; there’s a nuttiness to it and the olive oil on top isn’t just decorative. The falafel is crisp outside without being dry in the middle, which is a harder thing to get right than people realize.
Barb always gets the lamb plate. She says she’s tried other things exactly once.
Breakfast runs until early afternoon on weekends, and it’s worth knowing about. The shakshuka — eggs poached in a spiced tomato sauce — is one of those dishes that can be done badly in so many ways, and Fawzi’s version is careful: the sauce has depth, the eggs are cooked to the point where the whites are set but the yolks move when you poke them. It comes with pita that’s been warmed on the griddle. On a cold Bismarck morning it’s a genuinely good meal.
Prices are reasonable. A plate with protein, rice or bread, and a salad runs somewhere in the ten to fourteen dollar range. Nothing here is going to stretch your budget.
What makes Café Aladdin matter to me isn’t any single dish, though. It’s that Fawzi is just actually present. He’ll ask if you’ve been in before. If you haven’t, he might explain something on the menu or bring a small dish of olives while you decide. It’s not a performance — he’s just paying attention. In a city where a lot of restaurant experiences feel managed from a distance, that directness is something.
It’s not open late. Check the hours before you go, especially on weekdays, because they can run a shorter day than the sign suggests. Parking is a surface lot off the street with plenty of room. The lunch rush on weekdays can get crowded around noon — a few office workers from nearby buildings have clearly made this a regular stop — but it moves fast.
Barb has been right about a lot of things. She was right about this.
