Tourists who work up an appetite by riding camels in Jordan can now eat them as well — in a restaurant that features “camburgers.”
Zeyad Al Qusous, who opened the Q restaurant in 2012, decided to feature the dish to target tourists, the Jerusalem Post reported.
“The idea was to open a restaurant in Amman and we thought of making something for foreigners,” he said. “The most suitable thing was to make burgers because foreigners like burgers, including beef burgers and chicken burgers, so we decided to do something we called ‘camburgers.’”
Al Qusous said demand for the camburgers is much higher among tourists than locals because they want to try new things.
“We are the only restaurant in Jordan and the second restaurant in the Middle East making camel burgers, as the first restaurant is in Abu Dhabi,” Qusous said.
Q’s chef Noor al Turkmani said camel meat is lower in fat than other meats.
“When you eat camel meat, after 30 minutes you feel it is gone from the stomach because it is not heavy. It is really healthy because it doesn’t have much fat,” he said.
Camel meat tastes like “a cross between lamb and beef, but the taste will also depend on which cut of the camel meat is eaten — the fatty hump or other parts,” Ali Al Saloom wrote in The National, an English-language newspaper in Abu Dhabi.
One Q customer, Sameeh Abu Shammala, said he was curious to try a camburger.
“My friends always come here to eat them and after I heard about them I decided to try it and see what it tastes like,” he said. “It was a bit strange, the camel meat. When I ate it for the first time I found it very unique. It is good for your health and it does not have fat, it is low in fat.”
Regular burgers cost about $7 in Amman, but Qusous charges twice that for a camburger because he gets the meat in Madaba, a city about 25 miles east of Amman.