Where to eat IRAQ 🇮🇶 Vevey: Aladin

Aladin

Rue du Lac 8, Vevey

What we ordered: For two people, one Mosul had bah consisting of meatballs, potato, eggplant and bell pepper and one bania sommer consisting of lamb and okra. Both came with Iraqi-style rice and a side salad. To drink, we had a pot of Iraqi tea with cardamon.

Cost: 81 CHF / €86 / $94

Vevey is a super quaint francophone smallish city on Lake Geneva, full of life and culture, the sort of place where with enough money and peace of mind, one could get a small home by the lake and retire to one’s thoughts. Even as a day trip, it has this effect of calming an agitated mind. 

Beyond the breathtaking views of the lake, Vevey is also a home of culture beyond the masses. When we visited a photo festival was dotting the town with outdoor exhibits and brightly colored images, along with a photo book fair. While none of the work was per se stand out, it was not quite mainstream either. Rather, it was like a pop of color in a place where the blue of the water and the sky dominated the landscape in a monochrome of blues and grays.

Aladin is located about a block in from the coast on a tiny street, a little oasis that serves Iraqi as well as Moroccan and Lebanese food. This is likely to draw in more customers as there is not much of a market for stand-alone Iraqi restaurants in a country where cultural expectations of the other can dominate the discourse as well as the palate of culinary understanding. If you go to a Middle Eastern restaurant, the expectation is not an education in unexpected flavors but rather an affirmation of pre-existing conceptions. 

There were in total four Iraqi dishes on the menu, all classics, all savory rather than sweet, in addition to traditional Iraqi tea served with cardamon. As someone who very much came of age during the early war on terror years and whose college years were dominated by the discourse around the Iraq war and spent those years in New York shortly after September 11, 2001, this was by no means my first dalliance with the foods of what “The Daily Show” called in those days, “Mess o’ Potamia.” You have to know just a little bit more than “I like Middle Eastern food as I expect it to be” to get that one. 

Okra is a staple of Iraqi cuisine, as is lamb and lentils, rice and tea. The only thing I did not have were the lentils, as there were none on the menu, but okra was a must. I ordered the bamia sommer and found what I remembered most about Iraqi food, namely lamb so tender and okra so soft it melts in the mouth. The tomato stock enriched by the slow cooked lamb and onions and the right blend of spices.

Georg ordered the Mosul had bah, another savory dish enriched by different vegetables, namely potato and peppers, but similar in appearance and texture. Comfort food at its most authentic form, his plate was cleared before mine. The lamb similarly enhanced the vegetables as it reached the point of being fork tender.

Both dishes came with a side salad and a bed of vermicelli rice, with crispy small noodle atop and raisins in the rice. The savory of the lamb and vegetable stews combined with the raisins in the rice produced an interesting harmony of dried fruit and meat. Aladin’s owner Ahmad Bahadli is not just paying homage to Iraq with these dishes but full respect to the nation and its traditional flavors. Chased down with some cardamon tea, there was nothing overstuffed about the meal but essentially just the right amounts of everything.

While you are in Vevey, also stop by the nearby Bazar d’Istanbul grocery, about 300 meters from Aladin. A short walk along the lake leads to a market square, which was being used as a parking lot the Saturday we visited. Bazar d’Istanbul is on a small street a block or so inland from Lake Geneva. The Turkish as well as Arab-style grocery is a great place to stock up on everything from za’atar to manti to pickled turnips and baklava, all at extremely reasonable prices.

How to get to Iraq from Switzerland: 

From Switzerland to the Iraqi capital Baghdad by car it is an approximately 46-hour journey if traveling from the Swiss capital Bern – and there are no serious security incidents along the way. It might not be the safest given the road from eastern Turkey to Baghdad goes through some perilous places in Iraq, including Mosul and Tikrit, the hometown of the late dictator Saddam Hussein. Mosul though has greater notoriety in recent memory after ISIS seized control in the last decade and was later dislodged by a Western coalition of US-backed Kurdish forces.

However, if one were to make the journey by car, the road would run through northern Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey and eventually Iraq. 

You can forget about options by rail as they do not exist.

Given the irregularity of commerce and travel between Switzerland and Iraq, there are no easy and convenient ways to get to Baghdad, even more than 20 years after the U.S. invasion. The best options available are transiting through Istanbul and then Doha or Dubai. Flight times with layovers are well over five hours but it very much depends on the route and the day of the week whether this stretches into an over 10-hour odyssey.

For a place as ancient as Iraq, it is remarkable how politics more than geography has ruined the possibilities of easy transit. Prices while not out of reach are considerably more expensive than to Tehran, which appears to still have more active connections than Iraq to western spaces, despite sanctions and an active conflict, albeit one currently being conducted largely through proxies with Israel or by militias like the Houthis. 

How many people from Iraq are in Switzerland: Not even 7,000

Distance between Bern and Baghdad: 4,495 km

Distance from Restaurant Aladin to Baghdad: 4,451 km

Learn how to make Iraq's national dish, masgouf, and about its origins.

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