Adliya

I found Adliya the way you find the best neighborhoods — by walking in the wrong direction from my hotel and ending up somewhere better. It was eight in the evening, the temperature had dropped to something approaching comfortable, and the smell of grilled meat was coming from behind a vine-covered wall. I followed it through a gate and into the garden of what had been, not very long ago, someone’s house. Now it was a restaurant, and every table was taken.

Adliya is a residential district that has, over the past twenty years, quietly become the place in Manama where people actually want to be. Old villas with courtyard gardens have been converted into restaurants, cafés, and small galleries. The architecture isn’t grand — these are middle-class family homes from the 1970s and 1980s — but the gardens are generous and the pace is slow and the cooking is, in several cases, genuinely exceptional. The machboos I ate that first night — rice cooked low and slow with spiced broth, dried limes, and shrimp from the Gulf — was the kind of dish that makes you look down at the bowl and then up at the waiter as if he owes you an explanation for why you haven’t been eating this all your life.

The food isn’t exclusively Bahraini. Adliya runs the full range of the Gulf’s immigrant kitchen: Iranian stews scented with fenugreek and dried herbs, Lebanese mezze arriving in sequence as if the kitchen can’t stop, Pakistani grills with the correct char on the lamb. There’s an Indian restaurant in a converted villa that serves a fish curry so specifically coastal in its flavoring that it tastes nothing like what you’d find inland, and a Lebanese café where the fattoush is assembled with the seriousness it deserves. What connects all of it is a certain lack of pretension — this is a neighborhood that feeds itself and happens to let visitors in.

The galleries are newer and fewer, but several have established themselves in the quieter residential lanes running off the main restaurant strip. I spent an afternoon in one that showed work by young Bahraini artists — paintings and installations dealing with the tensions between Gulf tradition and the present moment, rendered with a directness that surprised me. One artist had photographed old pearl-diving boats alongside contemporary oil tankers and printed them at the same scale, so that the comparative fragility of the old economy became immediately, almost brutally, apparent.

Late at night, the coffee houses around the northern edge of Adliya stay open past midnight, and this is where the neighborhood reveals its actual character: mixed groups, conversations running in Arabic and English and Tagalog simultaneously, arguments about football and politics that seem to be the same argument. Bahrain has a reputation in the Gulf for being more open, and Adliya is where that reputation becomes specific and livable rather than abstract. I walked back to my hotel at eleven with the smell of cardamom still on my jacket and found I wasn’t tired at all.

When to go: Adliya works year-round because the dining is largely garden-based and the evenings justify it even in the hotter months. The gardens are most pleasant November through April. Go on a Thursday or Friday evening when the neighborhood is at its most social and the better restaurants fill up.