La Tabkha, Gemmayzeh, Beirut

Rue Gourard, Gemmayzeh, Beirut | Tel: +961 01 579 000 | www.tabkha.com | Google Maps
Other reviews: Lonely Planet

This is maybe the worst restaurant I have eaten at in a very long time. The food is Lebanese, mains priced at around 15,000 LL. The chicken escalope was served with chips and coleslaw and dripping in oil. The cordon bleu was dry. The buffet option was unimaginative, though cheaper.

Worst of all was the service, which was atrocious. The waiter spent most of the time laughing into his mobile phone, and walked off half way through my order, returning about 10 minutes (seriously) later. The fish fillet could not be grilled he assured us, despite their being other grilled options on the menu. Fried or nothing. Avoid La Tabkha at all costs.

Thinking about Syrian food (1)

I’ve wanted to write reviews about a number of Syrian restaurants in Damascus, especially in the Old City, but I’ve paused before doing so, because it’s hard to exactly how to do so. So let me first give a framework about Syrian food.

The first thing to note about Syrian food is that it can broadly be divided into three: street food, restaurant food and home food. There’s plenty of overlap, and the difference is not exactly clear cut, but it’s a useful way to proceed. I’m going to write about restaurant food today, and I’ll deal with street food (and with luck home food) later.

In Syrian restaurants menus are usually divided into cold appetisers (sometimes called mezze), hot appetisers, salads, mains (sometimes divided further into chicken, meat and fish), and desserts. Occasionally, especially at restaurants with gourmet aspirations, you’ll find pastas and pizzas.

‘Appetisers’ include hummous (sometimes also hot and with meat), mutabbal, muhammara and baba ghanouj, eaten with flatbread. The salads include fatoush, tabouleh, rocket salad, and oriental salad (no bean sprouts though, it’s more of a seasonal salad), and if the place is better, you will also find things like tuna salad, corn salad and so on. Kibbeh (balls of minced lamb with nuts and coated in bulger wheat) come grilled, fried or even sometimes raw. A selection of appetisers and salads can be enough for a nice meal. But for a ‘proper’ Syrian meal, you have to move on to mains.

In the ‘Mains’ section of the menu you’ll find shish taouk (chicken kebab), various mixed grills of marinated meat, steaks (beef and chicken) and often the perennially mis-spelled ‘cordon blue’ (sic.). They will be served with flatbread, chips, potato wedges, or sometimes rice. They may be accompanied by a small salad or vegetables (invariably courgettes and carrots with lots of butter). Sometimes at more adventurous restaurants you will find rice dishes on the menu, like kibseh or mansaf. This is rice, cooked in spices, with chicken or lamb, and sometimes also vegetables.

Most Syrian restaurants serve plates of fruit for desert, which is actually delicious. You may be lucky and get ice cream too. This will be washed down with tea or coffee, served short and with lots of sugar.

The good thing about Syrian restaurant food is that you know what you’re going to get. Variety is not prized, and quality is uniform (and good). The bad thing about Syrian restaurants is that there are no surprises; you will rarely, if ever, be wowed by something. If you are in Syria for a short time, you won’t mind, there will be enough different dishes to keep you amused. If you stay for longer, you may find that you quickly become bored; virtually no experimentation takes place and there is little imagination. You can compare the smokiness of the mutabbal in one restaurant to another, but that loses its lustre quickly. And it comes in addition to the fact that, since Syrian food comes with large dollops of oil, you can not enjoy your food and feel like you are doing damage to your body all at once. There are some really delicious Syrian foods (especially kibseh and mansaf) and some great raw materials (aubergines, olives, tahini), but Syrian restaurants can’t seem to put them together into an outstanding menu.

This is a shame, because restaurants that take Middle Eastern cuisine as a base and do good things with it can be outstanding, such as London’s Moro. As far as I can see there are two reasons for the stagnation. First, Syrian cooking knowledge resides with women, but restaurant chefs are always men, therefore the people with most potential to cook well are not doing so. (I don’t mean to say that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, incidentally, rather that it is a fact of Syrian society at this point in time that women do the coking at home.) Second, Syrian’s really like their food, and there is very little demand for someone to do innovative things with it—people go to the restaurants anyway. With a few exceptions (perhaps Naranj in Damascus), I don’t see things changing quickly.

(Also posted on Philip Blue's Blog.)

Mataam Zarzour, Jaramana, Damascus

Jaramana, Damascus | Tel: +963 932 117747

The overwhelming feeling at this place is of violently efficient service. Seated at the back of the restaurant, with an interesting maritime and shotgun décor theme, dishes were flung at us. Supposedly based on famous branches in Baghdad and Fallujah, Zarzour seems to be flourishing in its new location. To find it, simply take a service or taxi to Jaramana and then ask. It's just off the roundabout with the former president's statue on it.

The basic format seemed to be a starter of various salads and dips with bread, followed by a main, accompanied a variety of side dishes. A staggering array of sauces was available, taking up a good 10% of the table space, including: hot sauce, mango pickle, steak sauce, pomegranate molasses and apple vinegar.

The bread was fresh and excellent, the salata bazenjan (aubergine salad), as was the moussaka (the Arab version, rather than the Greek). The lamb in the Quzi was very tender, though the sauce was a little boring. The chicken on the shish tawouk was nicely marinated with lots of pepper, and well grilled. The sauces were good, though sometimes difficult to discern. One , a spinach, tomato and chick pea concoction was good.

At 600 SYP per head (no breakdown on the menu) Zarzour was good quality and good quantity, but distinctly over-priced.

Al Reef Italian Pizza, Old City, Damascus

Straight Street, Old City, Damascus | Tel: +963 (0) 11 543 5079

Tucked away on the south side of Straight St in the Old City, between Az Zeitoun and Al Abbara Lanes, this outdoor place serves only pizza and salad, but it does them very well. You are more likely to notice the big English sign, 'Italian Pizza' than the official name. The pizzas are freshly baked in a wood-burning oven.

Two medium pizzas cost 425 SYP, and they were more than enough for two. The vegetarian was particularly good, with a combination of mushrooms (I don’t know where they get them from, but ‘Italian Pizza’ uses fresh ones), cheese and olives supplemented with thinly slice courgette and green pepper. The tuna pizza was also good, and the base was thin and crispy.

The salads are tasty and good value. A tomato, cucumber and mushroom salad came in at 50 SYP and was large. The ingredients were fresh and it was well dressed. Beer and wine are not on the menu, but are available on request.

Altogether, ‘Italian Pizza’ would probably do well in Italy. The only apparent downside is that the seats are uncomfortable. However, this need not be a problem given that they do takeaway and delivery.

Maharaja II, Abu Rummaneh, Damascus

Restaurant Square, Abu Rummaneh, Damascus

This Indian restaurant is one of a chain of three (soon, apparently, to be four) across Damascus. The interior is nice, though small, with Bollywood films playing on a flat screen TV at one end.

The muglai chicken was well spiced, though not hot enough, and the khumb makai palak had a pleasing amount of spinach. However, the sauces were a little dry and it would have been better not to have used mushrooms rather than use the tinned variety, generally omnipresent in Syria, but which are revolting. The popodom was a little dry and the samosas had too high a pastry to filling ratio. The naan bread was pleasingly tasty and the rice was good, though obscenely expensive at SYP 200 for a portion. It would have been nice to have had a beer, but only the non-alcoholic variety was available. Main dishes were around 300 to 400 SYP without rice or bread.

In general, Damascus is better off for having a decent Indian restaurant, but some more competition would likely push the standard up and the price down. I have heard of another, called Taj Mahal, near the Cham Palace, but have not yet tried it myself.