Beneath the stretch of Kenmare Street that runs into Delancey and intersects with the Bowery, there’s an abandoned subway station – the old Bowery J stop. Its southern entrance currently serves as an event space and, this morning, a pop-up collaboration between Blue Bottle and a first-time Lebanese eatery called Manousheh debuts there.

Manousheh’s eponymous menu item is a paper-thin flat bread filled with strained cheese, vegetables and a mix of herbs foraged from the hills of Lebanon. The traditional sandwich is ubiquitous throughout the country and eaten regularly there for breakfast; but in New York, it’s practically non-existent. “Anything you find, they don’t get it right, or they try way too much when, in the end, it’s supposed to be street food and affordable,” freshman chef Ziyad Hermez said yesterday during the pop-up’s soft opening. “They set it up like pizza, but it’s not, it’s a sandwich.”

Hermez came to the U.S. ten years ago with a background in I.T., and scoured Washington D.C., where he lived at the time, and then New York City for the centuries-old recipe, but came up empty handed. “I decided this is something that needs to happen here. I left everything, went to Lebanon, and worked in a bakery,” Hermez recounted, and there he learned how to replicate his childhood breakfast. In addition to the traditional sandwich – whose dough is either cooked on an imported metal disk called a “firin” or in the oven – Hermez will also offer a sweet wrap with Nutella. [Link]