Iraqi food on its way

I spotted a sign above a shopfront at 682 Haight Street that's promising to bring Iraqi cuisine to San Francisco.

I'm certainly intrigued by this. Iraqi food hasn't really shown up on the American food radar yet. But as is common when one country invades another, culinary entrepreneurship is one of the rare positive cultural exchanges that results (witness Britain and India, Holland and Indonesia, etc). So perhaps we're on the cusp of a wave of Iraqi restaurants in the US? I'll bite.

The photo above is my horrendously low-quality cameraphone snap of the new spot. This is what happens when I'm caught out in public without my requisite photography crew...

Baghdad Nights claims to be "First Time Iraqi Cuisine", and for me it will be. It's interesting to note that Yaya, San Francisco's only apparent Iraqi restaurant, closed for good just a couple of weeks ago. But Stett Holbrook over at Metroactive did research and found that Baghdad Nights has been preceded by a few Silicon Valley outposts already.

I know and love my Middle Eastern food already, from Persian to Turkish to delicious delicious Greek-Middle Eastern hodge-podge, so I can't wait to try the Iraqi take on a koobideh kebab.