The house on the hill
Beit Sitti sits in a building in Jabal Amman — one of the residential hills in the older western part of the city — that looks exactly like what it is: a large family home that has been opened, carefully, for guests. There are photographs of grandmothers on the walls. There are ceramic plates from Hebron arranged above the kitchen doorway. There is, even before you begin cooking, the smell of clarified butter and dried herbs and something sweet browning slowly in a pan.
Maria Haddad founded Beit Sitti in 2010 with her sisters, turning their grandmother’s house into a cooking school and community kitchen. The name means “grandmother’s house.” The mission — though Maria doesn’t use that word — was to preserve the food knowledge of older Jordanian women: the techniques for making mansaf, the fermented jameed (sheep yogurt) that is its defining ingredient, the layered rice dishes, the mezze that most Amman restaurants serve in abbreviated form.
That mission has evolved. Beit Sitti is now also a women’s cooperative employer, a tour stop on multiple Amman food itineraries, and — particularly on days like International Women’s Day, which is when we visited — a place that hosts conversations about women’s work that go well beyond cooking.
How a morning at Beit Sitti works
We arrived at 9:30am, as instructed, for the cooking class that runs through to a late lunch around 1pm. The group that morning was eight people: us, a couple from the Netherlands, three women from the US on a heritage trip, and a French travel writer who had already been three times and was back, she said, specifically for the mansaf.
Maria herself was not cooking that morning — she was in a meeting, we were told; the school runs many classes simultaneously now and she can’t be in every kitchen — but we were introduced to Tara and Lina, two of the women who lead the morning sessions. Both grew up in Amman. Both had learned to cook from mothers and grandmothers. Both spoke about the food in the way people speak about a skill that matters: precisely, with specific opinion, with the confidence of people who know when something is wrong.
The morning had three main components:
Mezze preparation: We made mutabal (roasted eggplant with tahini and lemon), fattoush (the bread salad that is technically about using stale bread but is actually about the dressing), and a tomato salad with dried mint. Tara’s opinion on fattoush dressing was emphatic: sumac is not optional; pomegranate molasses is also not optional; anyone who makes fattoush without both is making something else. We did not argue.
Mansaf: This is the centerpiece. Mansaf is Jordan’s national dish — a ceremonial food eaten at weddings, funerals, Eid celebrations, and any gathering where the stakes of hospitality are high. It involves: lamb, slow-cooked in jameed (the fermented dried yogurt that gives mansaf its distinctive sharp tang); rice; flatbread as a base; pine nuts and almonds; fresh parsley. The correct way to eat mansaf is standing, with your right hand, taking the meat and rice and bread together in a ball. The jameed sauce is poured over everything at the table.
Lina’s note on jameed: it is made from goat or sheep milk that has been salted, strained, dried, and fermented over several weeks. The flavor is sour and deeply complex, with a sharpness that nothing else quite replicates. If you can’t find jameed outside Jordan, don’t attempt the dish; the substitutes don’t work. “You can taste the difference in five seconds,” she said, and she was right.
The bread: Heated on a taboon — a domed clay oven — until it puffs, then pulled and eaten immediately with the yogurt dips. There is a moment in every cooking class where something is better than it has any right to be, and this was it: fresh flatbread off a clay oven, eaten hot with labneh and olive oil, in a kitchen that smelled of all the right things.
The cooperative dimension
Over lunch — which was everything we’d made, plus extras that came from somewhere I didn’t see — Maria joined us and the conversation turned to the structure of Beit Sitti.
She is a focused, precise person who talks about the business with the same careful attention that Tara and Lina talk about food. Beit Sitti pays its staff a living wage; this is not universal in Amman’s service economy, and it’s worth stating directly. The cooperative model means that the women who work there have a stake in its success and some say in its direction. Several of them have been there since the early years. Several have used the income and skills to fund further education or, in a few cases, their own food businesses.
Jordan has a complicated relationship with female employment: the female labor force participation rate is among the lowest in the world (below 15% in recent years), driven by a combination of cultural expectation, childcare costs, and a formal economy that hasn’t created sufficient roles. Beit Sitti is not a solution to that structural problem. But it’s a real, functioning counter-example — a business built by women, employing women, in an industry where women’s knowledge (domestic cooking) has historically been unpaid and undervalued.
We asked about the Women’s Day framing. Maria shrugged slightly. “We do this every day,” she said. “Today just more people ask me about it.”
What to book
The standard cooking class runs about 35-40 JOD per person and includes the class, lunch, and coffee. Book at least a week in advance in high season (March-May, September-November); the classes fill quickly and cannot accommodate last-minute additions of more than one person.
If you want a food tour of Amman that includes Beit Sitti alongside other stops in the city — the downtown markets, the juice stands, the kanafeh shops — the guided women-led tour below combines all of it in a single morning:
Women-led food tour through Amman's culinary sceneFor the full context on Amman’s food scene — the restaurants, the markets, the street food spots — our Amman food tour guide covers everything you need.
A note on the food itself
I want to be specific about the mansaf, because I’ve eaten it in several Amman restaurants and nowhere else matched what we made in the Beit Sitti kitchen.
The difference is the jameed. Commercial mansaf in tourist-facing restaurants often uses a less intensely fermented version of the sauce, or supplements it with yogurt to reduce the sharpness. The Beit Sitti version uses properly aged jameed — sour, complex, almost cheese-like — and the result is a completely different dish. Richer, sharper, more challenging to the palate in the best way. The lamb had been cooking for three hours before we arrived; by lunch it fell apart at a look.
If you eat one thing in Amman, eat mansaf. And if you’re going to eat one plate of mansaf, make it this one.
The Amman destination page has a broader selection of restaurant recommendations, including places where mansaf is done properly without the cooking class context.