Richardson’s North Greenville Avenue corridor has been quietly building one of the most interesting concentrations of Middle Eastern food in North Texas for years. Most people driving through haven’t noticed. Salam Grill at 329 N. Greenville Avenue is a good reason to start paying attention.
The restaurant rebranded earlier this year under new ownership from the Albaghdady Restaurant that occupied the same space for three years before it. Owner Sam Raad brought the Salam Grill name from a Damascus original that opened in 1992 — a concept that has since operated in Dubai, Boston, and Tampa. The Richardson location is the brand’s Texas debut, serving Syrian and Iraqi cuisine over wood charcoal grills in a clean, welcoming room that fills up fast on weekends. Halal certified throughout.
Before getting to the menu, it helps to understand what Iraqi food actually is — because most Americans haven’t had it, and most of what passes for Middle Eastern food in the United States doesn’t reflect it accurately. Iraqi cuisine is one of the oldest on earth. The land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers — ancient Mesopotamia, modern Iraq — produced the first recorded recipes in human history, inscribed on clay tablets by Babylonian scribes around 1700 BC. The Sumerians were cultivating wheat, barley, lentils, onions, dates, and olives in this same soil four thousand years before that. When Baghdad became the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate in the medieval Islamic Golden Age, the Iraqi kitchen reached a level of refinement that influenced cooking across the entire known world. That history shows up on the plate in ways that distinguish it from Lebanese, Turkish, or Persian food — all of which are neighbors and relatives, but not the same thing.
What sets Iraqi cooking apart is its use of spice as fragrance rather than heat. Cinnamon, cardamom, cumin, dried lime, tamarind, and saffron build depth without building fire. The cooking is patient — slow braises, carefully grilled meats, flatbreads baked to order in tandoor ovens. The flavors are complex in a way that sneaks up on you. Nothing at a good Iraqi table announces itself loudly. It earns your attention over the course of a meal…