Inside Shukette's Modern Middle Eastern Menu

Shukette's menu is modern Middle Eastern: mezze and dips to start, bread to tear and share, then a wood-fired grill that anchors the heavier half of the meal. It's not tied to one country's cuisine specifically. Instead it pulls from across the region, chickpeas, tahini, sumac, labneh, and applies them with a chef's freedom to add ingredients that aren't strictly traditional, strawberries on labneh, hazelnuts on charred broccoli, without losing the throughline of where the food comes from.

If you've never heard the term "modern Middle Eastern" applied to a restaurant before, the easiest way to understand it is by what it isn't. It isn't a single-country cuisine like Lebanese or Persian food specifically, and it isn't a tasting menu with one dish per course. It's a format: shared plates that move from lighter and cooler to heavier and hotter, built around a kitchen that treats the region's pantry as raw material rather than a fixed rulebook.

Where the "modern" comes from

The base ingredients at Shukette are recognizably Middle Eastern: chickpeas, tahini, labneh, sumac, za'atar-style spicing, flatbread. What makes the kitchen "modern" is what it does with them. Labneh, a thick strained yogurt that's a staple across the region, arrives on Shukette's menu topped with strawberries, pickled fennel, fresno chile, and basil, a combination that reads more like a produce-forward composed dish than a traditional labneh plate. Not Your Average Hummus leans into that same instinct in its own name: it's built on marinated chickpeas finished with bang bang shata, the restaurant's own hot sauce, rather than a straightforward tahini-forward hummus.

This pattern shows up across the menu. Beet Tzatziki swaps the traditional cucumber base for roasted beets, keeping the yogurt, cumin, and dill that make tzatziki recognizable while changing its main vegetable entirely. Matbucha, a roasted eggplant and charred tomato spread with pepper, mint, and cilantro, stays closer to a traditional preparation, which is useful context: not every dish on the menu is reworked to the same degree, and the mix of straightforward and reinterpreted dishes is itself part of what a modern take on a regional cuisine looks like in practice.

None of these dishes abandon their roots. They start from a real, traditional dish and then get reworked with ingredients or techniques that wouldn't have been part of the original. That's the "modern" half of modern Middle Eastern: respecting where a dish comes from while feeling free to change what goes into it. It's a different approach than a restaurant that simply borrows a spice or two from a region without engaging with its actual dishes, and it's also different from a strictly traditional restaurant that treats every recipe as fixed. Shukette sits between those two, closer to reinterpretation than either extreme.

The menu is built in three stages, and the order matters

Shukette's menu reads almost like a script for how a meal should unfold, and the section names spell it out. "When You Dip, I Dip, We Rip" covers the mezze and dips: five rotating dips meant to be ordered two or three at a time and shared with bread from the "Rip This" section, which includes the Frena, a Moroccan-style flatbread with garlic and oregano, and the Lafa, a grilled flatbread finished with green garlic butter and aleppo pepper.

From there, the menu moves to "The Shuk," named for the outdoor markets found across the Middle East, and it's the largest section on the menu: salads, grazing vegetables, and a few heartier plates like the Adana (beef and lamb) or the Egyptian Spiced Grilled Wings. This section functions as a bridge, lighter than the grill mains but heartier than the opening dips, and it's where a lot of the produce-driven, seasonal cooking happens.

"Al Ha'esh," meaning "the grill," is the smallest section but carries the most weight per dish. This is where the wood-fired grill actually shows up on the plate: a whole grilled porgy, a saffron-yogurt marinated half chicken, a grass-fed steak shish kebab, a lamb kebab. Reading the menu top to bottom the way it's laid out roughly matches how a meal at Shukette actually unfolds, dips and bread first, Shuk-section plates next, grill mains last, which is worth knowing before you sit down and try to order everything at once. Our ordering guide walks through that pacing dish by dish if you want a specific plan for a first visit, and if you're eating with a bigger table, our guide to group ordering covers how the section structure scales once you're past two people.

Two more sections round out the menu without following that same three-stage arc. Accessories, a short list of sauces including bang bang shata, tahini, zhoug, toum, and white harissa, exist to top up dishes already on the table rather than to be ordered on their own. Soft Serve, the dessert section, closes the meal with a tahini-based soft serve in a few different builds, a fitting bookend given how much tahini shows up earlier in the mezze section too.

The wood-fired grill is the menu's real anchor

Even though "Al Ha'esh" is the shortest section, it's the one the kitchen is built around. Shukette's open kitchen puts a live-fire grill at the center of the room, and the four dishes on that section, Fish in a Cage, Joojeh Chicken, Grass-Fed Steak Shish Kebab, and Lamb Kebab, all depend on it directly.

That grill-forward identity is also what separates Shukette's version of modern Middle Eastern food from a mezze restaurant that treats small plates as the entire meal. Plenty of restaurants do dips and salads well; fewer build a wood fire into the center of the dining room and design a menu that leads there. The mezze and Shuk sections are genuinely strong on their own, but the grill is where the kitchen's specific point of view comes through most clearly, and it's usually the reason people come back.

The wine list leans into the same regional-but-not-strict approach

Shukette's by-the-glass wine list mirrors the food's philosophy in an unexpected way: it isn't built around Middle Eastern wine regions, since the region isn't traditionally known for wine production the way France or Italy is. Instead, the list draws from Portugal, Greece, Spain, Italy, France, and Georgia, organized by style, bubbles, white, rosé, and orange, rather than by country.

That's a practical choice more than a thematic one. A restaurant built around bold, spiced, herb-forward food needs wines that can stand up to it, and the list leans toward wines with enough acidity and structure to cut through dishes like the Egyptian Spiced Grilled Wings or a tahini-heavy dip. Orange wine in particular, wine made from white grapes with extended skin contact, shows up more prominently here than on a typical restaurant list, and it's a genuinely good match for the menu's spice and richness. Sulfites are a normal, expected part of any wine on a list like this, not something a diner can do much about at the table beyond choosing a lower-sulfite style if that's a genuine concern.

How it compares to Shuka, its older sibling

Shukette is chef Ayesha Nurdjaja's second restaurant, and it shares its modern Middle Eastern sensibility with Shuka, her earlier restaurant in SoHo. The two aren't identical: Shukette is built around a bigger room, an open kitchen, and the grill as a centerpiece in a way that reads louder and more market-stall than a typical sit-down dinner. But the underlying culinary approach, familiar regional ingredients reworked with a modern hand, comes from the same place.

If you've eaten at Shuka before and are trying to guess what Shukette will feel like, expect the same spirit of cooking with a different pace and a bigger, busier room built specifically around watching the grill work. Where Shuka reads more like a neighborhood restaurant that happens to cook this way, Shukette is built around the format as its whole identity, the open kitchen and grill aren't a backdrop, they're the point of the room.

Reading the menu without regional-cuisine background

You don't need to know the difference between Lebanese, Persian, and Levantine cooking traditions to order well at Shukette. The menu is written in plain English with enough description under each dish to know roughly what you're getting, and the section structure does most of the work of guiding a meal even if none of the specific dishes are familiar. Every dish description on the menu lists its main components rather than relying on a single unfamiliar dish name to carry the whole explanation, which makes it easier to order confidently even on a first visit.

A few terms are worth knowing going in. Tahini is a paste made from ground sesame seeds, used across several dips and dressings on the menu, and it shows up again in dessert form in the Soft Serve section. Toum is a whipped garlic sauce, served alongside the Joojeh Chicken, that's much lighter and fluffier than a typical garlic aioli, more like a savory whipped cream than a thick dip. Zhoug, a cilantro, serrano, and cardamom sauce available in the Accessories section, is one of the spicier options on the menu and a good one to ask for if a dish feels like it needs more heat.

Za'atar-adjacent spice blends and sumac, a tart, reddish spice made from dried berries, show up across several dishes and are two of the flavors most responsible for the menu tasting distinctly regional rather than generically Mediterranean. Urfa, a smoky, mildly sweet Turkish chile flake, appears in the Grilled Summer Corn and adds a different kind of heat than the fresher chiles used elsewhere on the menu. None of these ingredients require any prior familiarity to enjoy; they're just useful to recognize once you've had them, since they'll show up again in different combinations on repeat visits.

What this style of menu means for how you should plan a visit

Because the format is built around shared plates rather than individual entrées, a modern Middle Eastern menu like Shukette's rewards planning as a table rather than as individual diners. A solo diner at the bar can still eat well by ordering two or three smaller dishes across sections, but the format is really designed for two or more people splitting a spread that moves from bread and dips through to a grill main.

That also affects how you should think about pacing a reservation. Dishes arrive in waves as they're ready, not bundled by traditional course, so a table that wants to eat unhurried should expect the meal to take longer than a single-entrée dinner, and should book with that pacing in mind rather than squeezing a Shukette dinner into a tight before-or-after schedule.

This same shared-plates, wave-service format is also part of why the menu translates well to a larger private event, since a spread built for passing and splitting scales more naturally to a bigger group than a menu built around individual plated entrées would.

It also means a first-timer shouldn't expect the meal to move at a predictable, Western-restaurant pace, appetizer, entrée, dessert, each cleared before the next arrives. A dip might land at the same time as a Shuk-section salad, and a grill main might show up before the table has finished the bread. That's normal here, not a service issue, and it's worth mentioning to anyone at the table who's used to a stricter course-by-course rhythm so the pacing doesn't read as disorganized when it's actually just how a mezze-forward menu is meant to run.

Modern Middle Eastern cooking, as Shukette practices it, isn't a fusion gimmick or a trend dish here and there. It's a full menu built around a real culinary tradition, treated with enough freedom to feel current without losing what makes the underlying food recognizable. Reading the menu in the order it's written, dips, then Shuk, then grill, is the fastest way to understand both the food and the reasoning behind it.