A Yemeni feast fit for the end of Ramadan is the set meal at 145, but try the everyday fare too. photo: Hiroyuki Ito 145 Luncheonette 145 Court Street, Brooklyn, 718-624-9325. Open seven days, 7 a.m. till 9 p.m. No credit cards. Wheelchair accessible with assistance. more nyclife most popular most commented The Daddy Diaries: Hot Sex in the Golden Years La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger Estrellita Poblana III Counter Culture by Robert Sietsema Express Deli and Restaurant Fork in the Road by Sarah DiGregorio Al Green Samples Some New Producers Summer Guide by Mikael Wood Girls Love Gay Male Porn Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino My Boyfriend's Kink Is Getting Fat. What Do I Do? Savage Love by Dan Savage Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books Summer Guide by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Devo-Inspired Art in East Williamsburg (8) Maro The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo (5) Maria Luisa Tucker David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' (4) David Mamet Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (4) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard

Consistent with Arab hospitality customs, the food is served communally, and the salad appears with radiating forks already in place. You will be offered plates, which you should refuse unless your fellow diners are visibly diseased, or you mistrust them to share. The meat course comes on a round metal platter, bedded with sepia-stained rice marvelously aromatic of cinnamon and meat juices. At intervals around the perimeter little piles of a thick potato stew occur, so good you'll wish you'd gotten more. But the focus is the meat. The selection is negotiable, although Yemeni favorites like kidneys and liver run out early in the day. On several visits we enjoyed pleasantly charred lamb chops, a tender roast chicken with burnished skin intact, a heap of baby lamb rib nicely salted and falling off the bone, and mutton that had been thickly smeared with hawayij, a spice paste of caraway, black peppercorns, cardamom, and turmeric. Only the boiled lamb disappointed; it was tough and most of the flavor had already disappeared into the soup.

Such a prodigious meat display would be a rarity in impoverished Yemen, a feast appropriate to the end of Ramadan or some other festive occasion. But 145 Luncheonette also offers the common fare of the country, if you can read the menu or know to ask for it. First, there's fatut, a pottage of chopped vegetables and jalapeños in a stout broth buoying fragments of pita that dampen, become gummy, and eventually disintegrate. Another comforting concoction is assid, a giant doughnut-shaped dumpling with a lake of sauce in the middle. Tear off fragments of this African-style mash with your fingers and dip.

But foremost is salta, which sails in enshrined in a black iron cauldron that bubbles and sputters alarmingly. Underneath is a concentrated meat-and-vegetable gravy, while on top, a thick foam seems to be the product of some chemical reaction gone astray. It's hulba, an emulsion of powdered fenugreek seed and lemon that imbues the dish with a sour and bitter flavor. In Yemen it doubles as a folk remedy, and I can personally testify that it's good for what ails you.