When Riad Aamar sees a recipe would like to try, he just can’t himself. He has to put his own spin on the dish. You see, that is what makes his dishes special and provides him the proverbial joy of cooking. “I like adding or changing the recipe to come up with a new way of cooking the dish, making it my own taste,” he says, as he and his wife and business partner Joanna Lawrence, sit in Oliva on Main restaurant in the center of Bethlehem on a summer afternoon. “I don’t like just following the recipe exactly. To me, it’s fun to try new things and add new flavors to our dishes.”

The unique dishes that Aamar prepares are what keeps customers coming back to Oliva (Italian for olive) on Main, which relocated from Washington to its present spot two-and-a-half-years-ago. The menu at Oliva is a pleasing eclectic mix of dishes with a Mediterranean flair — a liberal but studied use of herbs, spices and nuts to delight and make the palate of diners dance.