These enterprising brothers and their families have cooked up Middle Eastern favorites in Greenville for 35 years.
Fred and Jill Sauceman
The Namouz family, from left: Zuhair, Hani, Feras, and Ziad.
When the oven reaches 800 degrees, it’s time. From that point on, the process of baking fresh pita bread goes quickly.
The baking time is short, only about 30 seconds. But it’s the culmination of work that started almost three hours earlier, just after dawn, at The Pita House in Greenville, South Carolina. And it happens every day.
The oven, powered by gas, was brought to Greenville all the way from the Holy Land in Israel. The Namouz brothers, owners of The Pita House, were born near the city of Nazareth.
That “tunnel” oven has been operating for about 18 years, but brothers Ziad and Zuhair have been proudly serving the flavors of their Middle Eastern homeland to diners in the South Carolina Upstate since 1988, when they started the business with their brother Nazih, who died two years ago. The brothers are Palestinian Christians—Catholics, to be exact, Ziad adds.
Fred and Jill Sauceman
Loaves of pita bread bake in about 30 seconds at around 800 degrees.
“It took the electric company about three months to calibrate this custom-made oven,” says Ziad, as he stands next to a work bench that holds a vise grip, pliers, drills and other equipment he and his brother Zuhair use in handling their own oven maintenance. The Namouz brothers’ standards are exacting. The pita dough must rise on a special kind of wood, “approved by the health department,” proclaims Zuhair. “Regular plywood will not do.”
The place where the bread is now baked used to be a dress shop. But slowly, as tastes for falafel and stuffed grape leaves grew in Greenville, so did the business, and the brothers added the grocery section and the bakery.
Hani Namouz, Zuhair’s son, was born one year before the restaurant opened. “Back in 1988, there was not a whole lot of diversity in food in this area,” he tells us. “It was mostly Mexican and Chinese. Now, we have Jamaican cuisine, Afghan cuisine, Persian cuisine.”
This year, Travel + Leisure magazine listed Greenville as one of the top 10 best food cities in America, alongside, among others, New York, Chicago, New Orleans and San Francisco.
Hani has worked at The Pita House since high school, taking time out to earn a business degree from Clemson University. His first cousin, Feras, son of Ziad, has done the same, adding a master’s degree in public policy from The New School in New York.
“The family, all of us, we have a place to come together, and the community that has developed around the business has become a part of our family, too,” Feras says, as he stands behind a case filled with handmade Middle Eastern desserts like baklava, sweetened with honey and rosewater.
“Thinking back to the COVID-19 pandemic, we never lost business. We never slowed down. The community rallied around us. That was beautiful to see. It’s a blessing to have this place and to share our culture, our history, our food with the people.”
While their uncles bake pita bread, Hani and Feras boil chickpeas, the main ingredient in two Middle Eastern classics, falafel, deep-fried, and hummus, a chickpea purée. Both are made fresh every day at The Pita House, using recipes that have been handed down in the family.
“Falafel is the national snack back home, a quick bite,” Ziad says. “And it’s so healthy with the chickpeas, parsley, onions and a little garlic. We still make it the same way we made it 35 years ago.”
Fred and Jill Sauceman
Hummus at The Pita House is dressed with a generous amount of olive oil.
Despite all manner of ingredients being added to hummus at other restaurants, the Namouz brothers and their sons stick to their original family recipe for it as well.
“Here it’s one flavor only,” says Ziad. “Back home, we ate hummus three times a day. We dress it with olive oil, paprika and parsley.”
Olives and olive oil form the basis of Pita House cuisine. In the market section, 12 different kinds of olives are available by the pound, from places like Greece, Lebanon and Sicily.
Before he bakes the morning pita, Zuhair prepares for us a traditional Middle Eastern breakfast. He takes several rounds of wholewheat pita dough and makes indentations in them with his knuckles, to show us his mother’s age-old technique. Then he finishes the rest with a roller, to demonstrate a more modernized approach. The purpose is to make sure these particular loaves of pita don’t puff up like the others.
Then Zuhair grabs a one-gallon canister of olive oil off the shelf and begins mixing it with za’atar, a spice and herb blend that members of the Namouz family always have on their home dining room tables, as readily available as salt and pepper. When the mixture is the right consistency, Zuhair spreads it over the bread and runs it through the oven, lightly toasting the sesame seeds that are in the za’atar. With some feta cheese, also made at the restaurant, it’s a great breakfast.
The Namouz brothers and their sons make their own yogurt and yogurt cheese, called labneh. They roll their own grape leaves. And at night, they serve kebabs and rice.
“Yes, we’re a business. We want to make money,” says Hani. “But we’re here serving our food as authentically as we can.”
Fred and Jill Sauceman study and celebrate the foodways of Appalachia and the South from their home base in Johnson City, Tennessee. They were first introduced to The Pita House by sisters Joyce and Nancy McCarrell, who ran a restaurant in nearby Travelers Rest.
The story above first appeared in our September / October 2023 issue. For more like it subscribe today or log in with your active BRC+ Membership. Thank you for your support!