After a couple months in business, Dar Mariam is starting to settle into its home in Vienna.
The restaurant celebrated its grand opening on Aug. 15 in the former Donutchew storefront at 107 Maple Avenue West, driven by a mission to bring authentic Arabian cuisine, particularly from Iraq and Kuwait, to a wider audience.
“We want to introduce true Arab hospitality and just show the Vienna community how Arabs are so hospitable and so kind,” Mariam Al-Timeemy, who owns the restaurant with her partner, told FFXnow.
According to Al-Timeemy, Dar Mariam — whose name translates from Arabic to “my home” — had been operating as a catering business since 2012, but years of persistent encouragement from customers eventually convinced her mother, the chef, to start a restaurant.
“She’s been doing authentic Khaleeji food, so mostly it’s whole lambs, a lot of chickens, a lot of fishes,” Al-Timeemy said, using the word for the Arab countries along the Persian Gulf. “People started telling her they’re like we love your food, but we don’t want to order a whole lamb every time we want to taste your food.”
The restaurant’s menu is generally the same as the catering one, except the dishes have been scaled down. Instead of a whole lamb, for instance, diners can order meat mechbous, which consists of roasted lamb chunks on a bed of saffron rice flavored with raisins, nuts and onions.
The chicken and meat mechbous and the muttaback zubaidi — a pan-fried fish stuffed with spices and dried lemons, served on rice — have become Dar Mariam’s most popular dishes so far, Al-Timeemy says.
Other entrees include lamb and chicken kabobs, tikka, shawarma and hamsa shrimp, which is a stew cooked in a tomato base. There is also a breakfast menu with falafel, hamsa with vegetables or lamb, a scrambled eggs dish called sahkshuka, and more.
The drink menu features mango smoothies, lemonade, mojitos with Redbull or Sprite, Turkish coffee and tea.
Al-Timeemy describes opening the restaurant as a rewarding experience, though she acknowledges there have been challenges as well.
As a first-time business owner, she has been learning as she goes along. Complaints about slow service have cropped up, but she hopes those issues will be resolved now that the wait staff has filled out.
“I consider all my guests and everyone that came to the restaurant my family, so my family has grown a lot, and I’m very happy,” Al-Timeemy said. “From what I’ve heard from the community, the community has loved the food. They’ve loved trying out all the new dishes.”
Currently a Falls Church resident, she’s looking to move to Vienna to be closer to the restaurant, adding that she has fallen in love with the town and found it “very supportive.”
In the future, she hopes to be able to expand Dar Mariam with a second restaurant.
“Our goal is just to share Arab hospitality, dishes and culture to the DMV,” she said. “We just want to introduce that because it’s very important to us. Arab, it runs in our blood and it’s just important that we share our cuisine and everything.”
Dar Mariam is open daily from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Orders can be placed in advance by calling the restaurant at 571-407-5807, which is recommended for some dishes, such as the fish, because they take a while to cook and might run out by the end of the day.
