Find refuge in za'atar

This is the impression you'll get if you visit King Arabic Sandwich Bar, a small and modest takeaway, bakery and mini-restaurant in the middle of Mayfair suburbia:

Middle East Mayfair

An exceedingly hospitable husband and wife team running both back and front of house and an array of delicious Middle Eastern food, including savoury pastries that contain everything from Arayesc (mince meat) to potatoes, spinach and cheese with za'atar; pita breads that are larger, lighter and flakier than the ones we are used to, and oven-fresh bread covered with za'atar.

Then there's creamy humus, babaganush (their spelling) and tabouleh in little tubs to eat there or take home, bottles of home-made labneh cheese, baby brinjals and containers of yet more za'atar.

You will also fall over wonderful pastries, biscuits and cakes. The semolina cake is comfort-bliss and the date-filled biscuits are wonderful - sweet (of course) but not cloying.

You'll notice there's no booze, but you can get a sugar rush on the syrupy guava cordial or go more exotic with the hibiscus drink.

All the sweet and savoury dishes are available to take home or order ahead in volume if you're entertaining. There's a menu with an array of order-ahead options.

"Specialising in Palestinian Food" the menu tells you. And this is the corner of the picture you might not initially have seen, though you've been tasting it in every bite.

Thus far the menu and the dishes around you might make you feel a little as if you've fallen into Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi's Jerusalem: A cookbook. There is much weirdness and irony in that.

Proprietors Hanan and Mohamed Sultan are Palestinian refugees who fled the prison conditions of the al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza almost a year and half ago. They were not welcomed by their immediate or even semi-immediate neighbours. They kept moving and ended up - perhaps unsurprisingly - in Johannesburg, a city that's a landing beach for constant waves of new immigrant communities.

The city, or at least the suburb, has embraced them. When a Mayfair resident heard that their young daughters had been left in Palestine (the initial trip, with no known end-point, was too risky for them) and that Hanan and Mohammed were worried sick about their safety, but there was no money left to bring them here, she arrived a few days later with the funds for the air tickets.

The daughters started school this year in the city they now call home, with (I bet) fine cheese pastries nestled in their lunch boxes.

• King Arabic Sandwiches, corner Hanover Street and 9th Avenue, Mayfair, 074-292-6191. Open every day from 8.30am to around 8pm or 9pm