We meet by the Al-Husseini Mosque at seven, when Balad has stopped being an office district and started being dinner. Six stops, roughly two hours of eating, and no menus anywhere. Falafel at Hashem, eaten off paper on a plastic stool in an alley that has looked the same since the 1950s. Sujuk in a shopfront two metres wide. Tamarind juice poured from a brass urn by a man who will not slow down for your photograph. Fresh knafeh at Habibah, cut at the window, orange and dripping, eaten in ninety seconds because that is the only correct way. In between we walk the gold souk and the spice alley and talk about why Amman's downtown ended up squeezed onto a valley floor. Honest warning: this is street eating. You will stand for most of it, the seating is plastic where it exists at all, and the only toilets on the route are the mosque's - functional, not pleasant. Vegetarians eat extremely well here. Vegans should message us before booking, because the knafeh is the whole point and it is not negotiable.
We started as four friends who kept getting the same question at dinner parties: where do you actually eat in Amman after eight? Not the hotel buffet, not the place with the laminated English menu. So we started walking people down into Balad ourselves. Between us we are two food writers, a former taxi driver who knows every one-way street in the valley, and an architect who will not stop talking about 1930s limestone. Every walk runs in the evening, because Amman is a different city once the heat drops and the shutters go back up. We keep the groups small, we eat standing up, and we will tell you honestly when something is overrated.
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