Breakfast in Riyadh: Tamees, Foul and the Wedding-Morning Porridge

Riyadh eats dinner late, which makes breakfast a smaller, earlier, more habitual meal than the evening one. It is also the meal where the city's layers are most visible, because what people eat in the morning came from several different places and settled here.

Tamees and foul, the everyday

The default Riyadh morning is a disc of tamees, hot from the oven, with a bowl of foul, slow-cooked fava beans. Tamees is a thick dough shaped into a ball, flattened, perforated with a toothed tool and baked fast against the wall of a hot oven, so it comes out blistered, chewy and slightly hollow.

Here is the part worth knowing. Tamees is not Najdi. It came from Central Asia, related to Afghan bread, carried into the Kingdom by pilgrims on Hajj and Umrah, and it naturalised so completely that it is now a staple in Riyadh, Makkah, Madinah and Jeddah. The bakeries that make it are still largely staffed by Afghan and Pakistani bakers, working the same ovens through the morning. Watching one being made is a legitimate reason to get up early.

Eat it torn, dipped straight into the foul, ideally within about ten minutes of it leaving the oven.

Jareesh, and why it means a wedding

Jareesh is coarsely crushed wheat cooked down with spices and finished with sour laban until it is a thick, tangy porridge. It is eaten year round, it is everywhere in Ramadan, and it carries one specific association: it is the traditional wedding-morning breakfast.

It is also, since 2023, the national dish of Saudi Arabia, designated by the Culinary Arts Commission. If you eat one traditional thing at breakfast in Riyadh, this is the one with the most meaning attached to it.

Areeka, and the dishes from elsewhere

Areeka is a soft cooked dough served with dates, ghee and honey poured over. Saudi sources claim it both for the south, where it is called an ideal breakfast, and for Riyadh Province, where it is a winter dish. Rather than an import, treat it as a genuinely shared southern and central dish that shows up differently in different rooms.

Several other breakfast dishes you will be offered in Riyadh came from other regions and are worth recognising as such. Masoub, baked bread worked with banana, honey and ghee in a wooden bowl, is Hejazi, from the west coast. Balaleet, sweet vermicelli with cardamom, saffron and egg, belongs to the Eastern Province on the Gulf coast. Shakshuka, eggs cooked down with onion and tomato, reaches Riyadh from the west and has a wider and much-argued origin beyond Saudi Arabia entirely.

None of this makes them less good. It makes Riyadh's breakfast table a map of the country.

Practical notes

Breakfast is early and unceremonious on a working day, and long and social on a weekend. Bakeries selling tamees run from before dawn; a good one will have a queue and no seating.

In Ramadan the whole thing inverts. Restaurants do not serve during daylight hours, the eating city runs from sunset to before dawn, and a breakfast plan simply does not apply. If you are travelling then, build the days around the night instead.

For the savoury dishes these grains turn into later in the day, see the Najdi food guide, and for the cardamom coffee that accompanies all of it, the coffee and dates guide. The whole cluster starts at what to eat in Riyadh.

Want a Riyadh trip planned meal by meal, in the season you are actually going? That is a TastePass itinerary, from $4.99.

FAQ

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