Gehad Hadidi, who has owned the famed French bistro in Midtown, La Bonne Soupe, since 2019, will be debuting his first original concept, Huda, in Williamsburg this fall.
Huda will be a neighborhood restaurant and bar housed at 312 Leonard Street, which was formerly occupied by Edith’s up until May. It will serve contemporary Levantine cuisine inspired from Hadidi’s own background. He first dipped his feet into New York hospitality when he took over the decades-old La Bonne Soupe from the original owning family, the Picot’s, in 2019. He opened his hospitality group, Hadidi Companies, the same year. Despite his untraditional path in the industry, he says hospitality is cooked into his culture. He hopes to bring the warmth and liveliness of the Levant to his neighborhood.
“I have a bit of an unorthodox background in hospitality but, at the same time, I grew up in a Levantine family, spending time in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, where hospitality is a huge part of the culture,” he tells What Now New York. “We turn our living room into a restaurant all the time.”
Huda’s cuisine will be inspired from Hadidi’s Levantine family origins. He grew up visiting his grandmother in Syria every summer and traveled within the region. He says he is taking the flavors of the Levant but playing around and applying French techniques to make pastas and other modern dishes.
“It’s about being respectful of tradition but also not being afraid to try something new,” he says.
One dish the restaurant plans to offer is Shish Barak, a Middle Eastern meat-stuffed dumpling cooked in yogurt. He says his spin on it will be a shiitake mushroom-stuffed patte. He will also have shrimp cooked in harissa, a spicy chili pepper paste from the Maghreb region of North Africa, and he is going to experiment cooking with anise, a spiced plant used to make a popular distilled Mediterranean spirit with a licorice-like taste, known in the Levant as Arak and in Greece as Ouzo.
Hadidi is from Detroit, a city with a large Arab population, where he attended Huda School & Montessori. He also went on to receive his masters in business administration at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, where he worked before moving to New York.
He recalls fond memories with friends at school, adding that attending also contributed to his fascination and love of Levantine culture. Huda, an Arabic word, roughly translates to “learning path,” which he says resonates with his experience in hospitality where he has figured it out along the way.
Hadidi hopes Huda will add to the already thriving Levantine cuisine scene in Brooklyn where Israeli restaurants, from Mesiba to K’Far, abound.
“Ultimately the main crux of what I’m hoping to achieve is to add to the Brooklyn culinary scene something that is Mediterranean and maybe slightly more contemporary, younger and fresher than what I’ve generally seen out there,” he says.
