Hummus is having a moment. You can find the creamy dip on menus everywhere you go in D.C., from the Watergate’s rooftop bar to gastropubs like City Tap House. We even have restaurants like Little Sesame, which just opened its second location, dedicating their entire menu to hummus. If you’re as obsessed with hummus as the rest of D.C., you’ll want to visit Cleveland Park’s Israeli restaurant Sababa this May. Showcasing his creativity and love for the chickpea-infused spread, Chef Ryan Moore is serving up 31 different flavors of hummus, one for each day of the month.
In order to come up with so many different flavors of hummus, Chef Ryan had to get inventive. Some of the flavors are from his wheelhouse, while others are new recipes, developed to be tied to May holidays. Perhaps the best one of all is what he did for May 4th. Chef Ryan came up with a ‘Masaba the Hutt’ hummus.
What?
Masaba is actually a popular type of hummus in the Middle East, in which chickpeas are left whole and then swirled in creamy tahini. Chef Ryan whipped his up with olives, then molded each serving to look like Jabba the Hutt, complete with olive eyes and an olive oil grin, and called it Masaba the Hutt. One of a kind and also delicious – the chickpeas add texture, and the olives give just the right amount of salty and bitter.
Other holiday specials include Cinco de Mayo, which featured a smoked avocado hummus, topped with sweet corn and Mexican cheese. On Mother’s Day, he’ll serve hummus with baby veggies (get it?) and on Memorial Day, the spread is infused with roasted red peppers and topped with hunks of feta cheese, to highlight American colors (blue hummus proved a bridge too far).
Days in between the holidays could feature a beet hummus, where the chickpeas and tahini are blended with pureed roasted beets, topped with preserved orange and pistachios, or a preserved lemon and sugar snap pea hummus. There is no calendar of specials so you will have to be committed to being surprised on any given day. My favorite may have been the sugar snap pea hummus, just because it’s so representative of spring. I love the way the crunch is the perfect yang to the hummus’ creamy yin.
Keep in mind on each day of May, you can only sample the hummus of the day – so no going back. You have already missed a week of hummus creations so if I were you I would pencil in Sababa for dinner as many times as you can this month.
