‘Middle-Eastern’
I’ve probably never thought that Middle Eastern food is the type of food that needs innovation and modernization. Give me some well-executed schwarma nearly any day of the week and I will be a happy man. Yet, Pita Jungle not only exists in the Phoenix area, but it has multiple locations that demonstrate a pattern of success. Oh, and it just oozes modern Middle Eastern.
Persian food is a special type of Middle Eastern food, and thus I was very excited to learn that Scottsdale has its own Persian restaurant, appropriately named the Persian Room, because it’s basically one big room. With Persian food. And like any Persian restaurant worth its salt, its menu was vast and filled with all sorts of meats and rice. Essentially it was the kind of place that was made for an unvegan.
You know what’s great about being Jewish? No Lent. No Ramadan. Sure, there’s been thousands of years of persecution and an annual fast or two, but nothing that compares to the longevity of the institutionalized pain of those two holidays. Worse still, sometimes Ramadan falls in the summer and you can’t even drink water. With all of these thoughts in mind, I found myself in Malaysia in the summer in the middle of Ramadan. And in Sandakan in Borneo, this meant the nightly Ramadan Market. The most impressive part about it is that observant Muslims somehow manage to walk up and down the market and order food without eating a bite of it until the sun goes down. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait.
Food court food isn’t typically known to be great, but then food court food isn’t generally Middle Eastern. Massis has kind of built a food court empire around LA, dishing out mostly Middle Eastern food with a sprinkling of random things like Argentinean Skirt Steak and Idaho Trout. I found myself at the Santa Anita mall and went looking for kabobs.
Hailing from the closest thing to the Middle East outside the Middle East (Michigan) I often crave me some schwarma. Unfortunately, Pittsburgh wasn’t satisfying this craving until I heard about Salem’s Market & Grill in the Strip District. The restaurant is set up kind of like a cafeteria, but with the addition of spinning spools of meat. There was Indian food as well, but I was at Salem’s for one thing only.
Straddling the campuses of Carnegie Mellon and Pitt, Craig Street is where ambitious students can often be found eating lunch or dinner between classes. On that street is a little Middle Eastern restaurant called Ali Baba, which I found myself eating at based on a high recommendation. The recommendation was mostly based on something that have called Kibbee Nayyee, which is a raw lamb dish that is apparently pretty hard to find.
Look at the picture to the left, ignore the title of this post and tell me what you see. If you are like me, you probably think that is a burrito. It has the signature Chipotle foil, a nice fold and the grill marks that usually come with a tortilla. But this is no burrito, this is a chicken schwarma wrap from Pita Kitchen in Sherman Oaks, a hole in the wall to be remembered.
While LA has its fair share of Middle-Eastern restaurants, Kabab Grill in Palms boasts something I haven’t seen elsewhere: its own pita oven. Growing up with the Middle-Eastern restaurants of southeastern Michigan, I just kind of assumed every place had their own oven, but in LA I learned this was not the case. Yet, a pita oven alone does not make a place great, so I was eager to see how this Syrian-flavored place would taste and hoped it didn’t taste like the blood and tears of civil war (too soon?).
When my buddy recommended heading to a place called Mantee in Studio City, I was really excited to eat a sea cow and hoped the manatees were farm-raised (because we all know they are endangered in the wild). But he quickly corrected me, saying that the restaurant was lacking that all-important second “a” and was actually Mediterranean. And one look at the menu showed this was not your typical Mediterranean. There were no schwarma wraps to be seen here and instead items like that were replaced by unique Lebanese, Turkish and Armenian delights.
On Friday night, I was lucky enough to be invited to an all-expenses-paid dinner courtesy of the Chulews. We headed to a place in a strange part of town that isn’t quite West Hollywood and isn’t quite Beverly Hills called Cayenne Cafe. Not to be confused with the pepper or vehicle, Cayenne was a sort of upscale Middle Eastern restaurant with a side of steakhouse. Being Passover, I was a little bit limited by the menu, because I couldn’t get anything with pita. Fortunately, there was that whole steakhouse thing going on and I could take advantage of that.