What to Order at Shukette: A First-Timer's Guide

Order the Frena bread the moment you sit down, then pick one dip while you decide on everything else. That's the fastest way into a Shukette meal, and it buys you time to actually read the rest of the menu instead of ordering under pressure while the table around you is already eating.

Shukette runs on a mezze-first, grill-second format: small shared plates arrive in waves, and the kitchen doesn't wait for you to finish one course before starting the next. If you've eaten at a Middle Eastern or Mediterranean sharing-plates restaurant before, the shape will feel familiar. If you haven't, the main thing to know is that nothing here is really a solo dish. Order for the table, not for yourself.

The restaurant leans into this on purpose. It's chef Ayesha Nurdjaja's second restaurant, a louder, faster sibling to Shuka in SoHo, and the format reflects that: an open kitchen, a wood-fired grill at the center of the room, and a menu built around passing plates rather than plating individual courses. The bread and dips make the strongest opening move on the menu, and the grill section is where the kitchen's identity really comes through, which lines up with how the menu itself is structured to pace a meal.

Start with bread, because it comes out fastest

The two breads on the menu are the Frena, a Moroccan-style flatbread with garlic and oregano, and the Lafa, a grilled flatbread finished with green garlic butter, aleppo pepper, and sea salt. Both are meant for tearing and dragging through whatever dip lands next to them, not eating on their own.

Order one bread for every two people at the table. The kitchen sends bread out quickly, almost always before the first dip arrives, so it's the thing that keeps hands busy while you're still deciding on the rest of the order. If your table is four or more, get one of each rather than doubling up on the same bread. The Frena is softer and more pillowy; the Lafa has more char and a sharper, buttery edge. They're different enough that a table splitting both won't feel like it ordered the same thing twice.

The dip section is where the kitchen shows its hand

Shukette's dip section is officially called "When You Dip, I Dip, We Rip," and it's the clearest window into what this kitchen actually does well. Five dips sit on the menu at any given time, and picking two is usually the right call for a table of two before anything else shows up.

Not Your Average Hummus earns its name honestly. It's built on marinated chickpeas with a bang bang shata kick, which is the restaurant's own hot sauce, and it's spicier than a standard hummus plate. If you want something milder to balance it, Labneh is the better second choice: thick strained yogurt topped with strawberries, pickled fennel, fresno chile, sumac, and basil, which sounds like a strange combination on paper and works because the fruit cuts the tang of the labneh instead of fighting it.

Matbucha, a roasted eggplant and charred tomato spread with pepper, mint, and cilantro, is the closest thing on the menu to a classic North African dip, and it's a safe, crowd-pleasing pick if your table isn't sure what to order. Beet Tzatziki swaps the usual cucumber for roasted beets against yogurt, cumin, and dill, and it's the most visually striking plate on the table before anyone's taken a bite. Smoked Arctic Char, built on a smoked onion-garlic aioli with dill, red onion, and lemon, behaves more like a spread than a true dip, and it's the pick if your table wants something that reads closer to a smoked-fish course than a vegetable dip.

Two dips and a bread is genuinely enough to hold a table of two for the first ten minutes of the meal. Don't order three dips before anything else arrives; save room, because the Shuk section and the grill are both coming.

The Shuk section: salads and small plates that aren't afterthoughts

The Shuk section is where Shukette keeps its salads and vegetable-forward small plates, and it's easy to underorder from here because it reads like a side-dish list on the menu. It isn't. The Little Gem Salad, built with peaches, pickled shallot, tarragon, chive, champagne vinaigrette, and walnut, is a genuinely composed dish, not a green-leaf filler between courses. Watermelon and Feta with cucumber, mint, honey, lime, sumac, and aleppo is the better order in warmer months, and it's built to cut through the richness of whatever grill dish lands next to it.

If your table wants something with more char, the Charred Broccoli Di Ciccio, finished with herbed tahini, pickled shallot, fresno, hazelnut, and mint, or the Grilled Summer Corn with basil lime butter, serrano, and urfa pepper both bring real grill flavor without committing a full main course to a vegetable. For something richer, the Fairytale Eggplant, served with labneh and coriander hot honey, splits the difference between a dip and a hot dish, and it's one of the more distinctive things on the menu if you haven't had eggplant prepared this way before.

One Shuk-section dish per two people is a reasonable rule. Order it to land after the dips and roughly alongside the first grill dish, not before, since it's substantial enough to compete with the mains for attention if it shows up too early.

What comes off the grill

Al Ha'esh, the grill section, is where the kitchen's identity really lands, and it's built around live fire rather than a flat-top or oven. The Joojeh Chicken, a saffron-yogurt-marinated half chicken finished with toum and bang bang shata, is the dish most tables end up building their order around. It's a large plate meant to anchor a table of two to four, and the combination of saffron marinade and whipped garlic toum is distinct enough that it's worth ordering even if you don't usually order whole-chicken dishes at a restaurant.

Fish in a Cage is the more theatrical option: a whole porgy grilled between two wire racks and topped with green charmoula, a bright herb-and-oil sauce. It's a good pick if your table wants something lighter than the chicken or the kebabs, though whole-fish dishes take more effort to eat around the bones, so it's a better choice for a table that's comfortable working through a whole fish together rather than eating fast.

For red meat, the Lamb Kebab comes with baharat-spiced potatoes, whipped goat cheese, shishito peppers, castelvetrano olives, and chili, and it's built to split three ways rather than serve one person. The Grass-Fed Steak Shish Kebab comes with grilled vegetable couscous, halloumi, charred pepper, tomato, and parsley, and it's the pick if your table wants steak without ordering a standalone steakhouse-style cut.

One grill dish for every three to four guests at the table is enough. These are the largest, most filling plates on the menu, and ordering two for a table of four usually means food goes home in a box.

How much to actually order

A workable ordering plan for two people: one bread, two dips, one Shuk-section dish, and one grill main split between you. That's five dishes, which sounds like a lot until you remember every plate here is meant to be shared and portions run smaller than a single entrée at a non-sharing restaurant. For a table of four, scale to two breads, three to four dips, two Shuk dishes, and two grill mains, adjusting up if the table is still hungry after the first wave arrives.

Table size	Bread	Dips	Shuk dishes	Grill mains
2 people	1	2	1	1 (split)
4 people	2	3–4	2	2
6 people	2–3	4–5	3	2–3

Because the format is shared plates rather than individual entrées, the per-person total usually runs higher than any single dish's price would suggest. Check the full menu with current prices before you go so the table can budget roughly what a shared order will cost, since prices aren't fixed once they're printed here and the kitchen adjusts the menu seasonally.

Vegetarian and dietary notes

Shukette is a grill-forward kitchen, so its most talked-about dishes (Joojeh Chicken, Fish in a Cage, and the Lamb Kebab) are all meat or fish. That doesn't mean a vegetarian table goes hungry. Most of the dip section, several Shuk-section salads like the Little Gem Salad and Watermelon and Feta, the Fairytale Eggplant, and the Jeweled Rice (basmati rice with saffron, cranberry, dill, cilantro, orange, and pistachio) are all vegetarian, and a table leaning on those sections can put together a full meal without touching the grill menu at all. The Chickpea Flaxseed Cracker in the bread section is also marked gluten-free if that's a concern for your table. Call ahead if you're managing a specific allergy, since a guide site like this one can't confirm the kitchen's cross-contact practices dish by dish.

What to drink, and where to save room for dessert

Shukette's wine list runs by the glass across five styles: bubbles, white, rosé, orange, and red, and it rotates often enough that specific vintages aren't worth memorizing before you go. As a rough pairing guide, the orange and white wines hold up best against the dip section and the Shuk-section salads, since they're light enough not to fight the acidity in dishes like the Watermelon and Feta or the Little Gem Salad. Save a red or the Cabernet Franc for whichever grill main lands at your table, particularly the Lamb Kebab or the Grass-Fed Steak Shish Kebab, where a lighter wine gets lost against the char and the baharat spice.

If you'd rather skip wine entirely, the Gazoz section is worth ordering into on its own. These are spritz-style drinks built on aperitif wines and natural fruit infusions, topped with sparkling wine and soda, and a non-alcoholic version exists for each one. The Watermelon Gazoz, made with sugar baby watermelon, lemon, dry vermouth, and brut sparkling, is the closest thing on the drinks list to a warm-weather aperitivo, and it works well as a first-round order while the table is still deciding on food. Shukette also pours two cocktails and a small beer list if you'd rather keep things simpler, plus a couple of no-proof options like the Preserved Lemon Spritz for anyone not drinking.

Dessert is simple by design: three soft-serve options, and no other dessert course. The Swirl, a combination of tahini soft serve and blueberry sorbet with spiced almond granola, is the pick if you want to try both flavors at once, and it's a genuinely different way to end a Middle Eastern meal than the standard baklava-or-nothing choice at a lot of restaurants in this category. The Mic Drop, tahini halva floss with hazelnut and pomegranate, is the richer, more dessert-forward pick if your table wants something closer to a traditional sweet finish. Order it even if the table feels full; portions are small enough that it's rarely a mistake, and the tahini soft serve isn't a flavor you'll find replicated at most other restaurants nearby.

Before you go

Once you've got a rough plan for what to order, the two things worth sorting out before you show up are a table and a sense of what the whole meal will cost. Reservations release 14 days ahead on Resy, and parties of one to six can book online directly; if your group is larger, the restaurant handles that by phone rather than through the app. Weekend slots for a table of two tend to go quickly once the window opens, so it helps to check right when the new date becomes available rather than a day or two later.

Since every dish here is priced individually with no fixed tasting menu, checking prices before you go is the easiest way to make sure your ordering plan matches what you're comfortable spending, since a five-or-six-dish order for two adds up faster than the same number of appetizers would somewhere with individual entrées. Prices and specific dishes shift with the season, so treat the ordering plan above as a starting point rather than a fixed script, and let whatever the kitchen is running that week nudge you toward whichever dip or grill dish sounds best once you're actually looking at the menu in front of you.