Coffee Shops (shishas) & Sweet shops - Manama, Bahrain

Hookah/Shisha

The image in my mind of sheikhs smoking shishas (better known to us as hookahs) in street corners is real - Bahrain lives up to it. Streets are dotted with coffee shops serving shishas in innumerable flavors, coffee, tea and snacks. Strangely, smoking the shisha seems to be a private activity. You do see groups of men smoking it, but more often than not you see a lone man with his shisha and a pot of mint tea.

Definitely stop by Al Bindaira, perhaps the hippest coffee shop in Bahrain and grab a shisha and a pot of mint tea

Link to their Adliya location

Arabic coffee and Halwa

One of the many guide books we referred to led us to believe that these shisha shops serve Arabic coffee (a special way to brew coffee with cardamom and saffron). We walked in and out of at least a dozen coffee shops in search for Arabic coffee with no luck. The traditional Arabic coffee has now been replaced by the French and Italian versions; cafe au lait, cappuccino etc... You also find a lot of Turkish coffee in Bahrain.

After hunting around for almost ten days we finally found Arabic coffee at a sweet shop and it was an experience well worth the wait. The traditional way of drinking it is having a sip of the beverage and then biting into a date. The coffee itself does not contain any sugar. The sugar-filled date makes up for it.

The sweet shop however served us coffee with Halwa. We had sips of Arabic coffee and followed it up with spoons of Halwa.

Now, Halwas are a delicacy worth trying. The name of sweet shop you should look for is Showaiter - a family that has been in the sweet business for the past hundred and fifty years. Every store had three colors of halwa - green, red, and orange. They were dotted with several cashew nuts. Within these colors there are two varieties; oil based and ghee (butter) based, definitely opt for the butter. The Halwa with its jello like consistency invites you to eat more of it again and again...

Link to the ubiquitous Showaiter sweet shops

Baklava

You find Baklavas at several sweetshops all around Bahrain but nothing compares to the ones at Saadeddein pastry. They have about twenty varieties: different shapes and sizes of filo like pastries filled with almonds and pistachios. You can try one of each or more (if you know the store keeper) before buying a few to take back home. They stay fresh without refrigeration for about three weeks.

Link to their Manama location

Burgers in Bahrain (An Island country in the Arabian Sea) - Manama, Bahrain

And the winner is The Boardwalk at the Wahoo water park.......
Have always been a fan of the sandwiches and burgers; assorted foods between slices of bread have always appealed to me.
Have envied people biting into their juicy burgers in America (right from the days when the America in Archie comics was the only America I knew). I could not eat the real deal, but the burger/sandwich chains did come up with different vegetarian versions: flavorless, tasteless, soy based slabs of dehydrated vegetarian patty. Did not cut it for me.
The burgers in Bahrain are different; they have, not the soy, not the marginally better bean, but the potato and mixed vegetable patty (Aloo tikky-like). I tried vegetarian burgers at two joints: The Boardwalk at Wahoo Water park and Jasmis (a local burger chain, with a red and yellow logo bearing an uncanny resemblance to that of Mcdonald's)

The Boardwalk at Wahoo water park

We spent a good portion of the morning enjoying the rides at the Water park. We did work up quite an appetite, walking up several sets of stairs leading to the different appropriately named rides (black hole, master blaster, splish and splash etc..). Soaking wet, we walked into The Boardwalk, bang at the centre of the Water park.
Delighted to find vegetarian burgers, ordered a few with cups of coffee and tea. The patty had the perfect golden outer crust (breaded and all) with a soft, very well seasoned, potato mix at the center. The warm burgers with ketchup and sips of cardamom tea was the perfect snack to get us geared up for another session of water rides.

Jasmis

Encouraged by our positive experience, we tried the burgers at Jasmis located in the food court at the Bahrain city center mall. The same potato filling, similar looking patty, but the smell and the taste were totally off. We suspect the oil; will not eat there again.
Both Burger King and Mcdonald's  have their versions of vegetarian burgers. Will try them on my next trip to Bahrain.