The sea has come to the table: baby octopus, fat loops of calamari and shrimp like curled fists, in a rust-red stew borne hissing through the dining room of Hamido Seafood in Astoria, Queens.
The rim of the pot is crusted black with char; bell peppers, just breaking the surface, show off blistered skins. The pot keeps hissing, still furious from the oven, until we’re too impatient to wait any longer and start spooning it out, braving burned tongues.
There’s a briny smack, and then the enveloping richness of tomatoes, collapsed and mellowed. The stew — an Egyptian-style tagine, cousin to but distinct from the Moroccan dish, pronounced with a hard G and more savory than sweet — is earthy, despite its emissaries from the deeps: surf and turf, as one.
Moghared Mansy, known as Rudy, and his cousin Mohamed Abuker opened Hamido Seafood last May. They grew up in the ancient port city of Alexandria, Egypt, ever shadowed by the sea, whose memory is honored here in a sprawl of nets, anchors, life preservers and looming silhouettes of sharks. Interspersed are black-and-white stills from the beloved 1957 Egyptian comedy “Son of Hamido,” about the antics of two young fishermen who (spoiler alert) are in fact police detectives in disguise.
Directly across the street is the longstanding Greek seafood restaurant Taverna Kyclades, whose superstar reputation has earned it lines down the block. Those wearying of the wait might want to consider a slight shift in palate. Egypt and Greece are separated by a little less than a thousand miles; here, it’s a matter of about 200 feet, with Ditmars Boulevard a stand-in for the Mediterranean Sea.
Note that it can get crowded on this side, too. As at other neighborhood seafood spots, you start at the counter, where you select your seafood and method of preparation. Only then are you alloted a number and ushered to a table. Sometimes there’s a pileup as diners dither over the jewelry-case array of silvery orata and branzino, wild red snapper with blushing tails and striped bass on mounds of ice, alongside smaller mullets and sardines, trays of plump shellfish and octopus tentacles draped as if poised to escape.
All come from the fish market in Hunts Point, the Bronx, and are treated by Mr. Abuker, the chef, with a wisdom that, Mr. Mansy said, is the inheritance of anyone who grows up in Alexandria. (Mr. Abuker’s name tells half the story: His uncles on his mother’s side are fishermen from Abu Qir, a tiny town on Alexandria’s northeastern edge that draws pilgrims solely for its seafood restaurants, which range from temples that seat hundreds to tables on the beach.)
The staff will gently guide you toward the recipes best suited to each fish. Order snapper sengari, and it arrives in the flaming colors of sunset, butterflied and stuffed with tomatoes and celery, almost a tagine in reverse. Orata might be dressed in wheat bran that blackens on the grill until it gleams like volcanic glass. The bran protects the fish, holding the juices in; peel the skin and the inside obligingly flakes.
On any given night, there’s little overlap among tables. Some diners might favor fried mullets in crackly coats of flour and seasonings that Mr. Mansy prefers to keep confidential, or baked sardines doused with lemon like poured-out sun, or shrimp and octopus turned over charcoal and adorned with little more than extra-virgin olive oil. None of this is revelatory; it is simply perfect.
A server will appear to take an order of sides, foremost among them molokhia, jute leaves cooked down until neither solid nor liquid, a dark, clingy soup that almost refuses to give up the spoon. In viscosity, it has kinship to okra, but also oysters; the slipperiness is the point.
Egyptian moussaka foregoes both the béchamel of the Greek version and the usual ground beef, so all attention is given to the eggplant, roasted in tomato sauce until the flesh goes lush. Even rice is of note, not a blank canvas but a mottled bronze, the grains cooked with butter and onions brought to the edge of burning.
As for the tagine, it is currently unlisted on the menu, a covert glory, its presence known only by word of mouth. “It’s a special dish,” Mr. Mansy said. But if enough diners ask for it, he added, they might give it a permanent place.
Please ask.
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