Zahav

Whenever I travel somewhere, I try to look for aspects that make a place very unique.  Philadelphia has a very nice food scene.

For a weekend trip with very limited time, I wanted to find a place that really stood out.  Zahav is that kind of place.  Here, they serve the cuisine of Israel, which is much more than the Jewish food you can find at some New York deli.  The cuisine has much deeper and complex roots than that.  Israel and the surrounding area known as the Levant has been conquered repeatedly over history by the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Ottoman Turks among others.  All of these cultures left their influences on the food.

The menu at Zahav consists of mezze or small plates, showing some similarities to its Mediterranean neighbors Greece and Turkey.  The menu has To get an idea of the food they serve here, I go with one of there tasting menus, Tayim.

Hummus Masbacha with Laffa

Bread: it must be a part of the meal.  But this bread is awesome.  It's crusty on the outside and slightly spiced with zatar.  And it's great for scooping up hummus.  This is not the packaged stuff from the supermarket.  This ubiquitous chickpea, tahina, and garlic spread is made in house and served warm with olive oil.  Masbacha is served with warm chickpeas with tahina on top.  It's really rich and delicate.  I mean, it had me at olive oil.  Olive oil is one of my biggest obsessions.  So much so, that I can drink this stuff straight up.

Salatim

This is the highlight of the meal and it's all vegetables.  This is a spread of 6 different salads with varying flavors and tastes.

There was Moroccan spiced carrots, green beans with olive oil and harissa, and Israeli cucumber and tomato salad.  The carrots pack quite a punch with the heat while the beans had a hint of heat.

Finally, there's tabbouleh, salt roasted beets with tahina, and twice cooked eggplants.  The tabbouleh contains kale, parsley, and bulgar wheat.  Personally, I really liked the beets.  They are mashed and mixed with tahina, or sesame paste.  The eggplant dish is very complex, containing red peppers, lemon, onion, and garlic.  Sadly, all these great ingredients were ruined by my most hated food ever.  Every element could be tasted, especially the eggplant.

Right away there's a ton of food that I'm scarfing down with bread and I started to get full.  Yes, veggies are getting the best of me.  At this point, I was about to call it a night.  The salami, laffa, and hummus would be a meal for any person in a decent state of mind.  It wasn't until the first mezze came in that I realized, I haven't had any meat yet.

House Smoked Sable

This is cold smoked fish on top of challah bread with an egg inside.  The waiter slices the bread in half, letting the oozing yolk leak out on to the plate.  It's sort of like a reverse French toast.  Mix that with the smoked fish and you've got a perfect Jewish breakfast.

Yemenite Beef Stew

This is not your ordinary beef stew with potatoes.  They use beef short rib and harissa for heat.  This broth is spicy but light.

Lamb Merguez

This consists of spiced lamb sausage with oyster mushrooms and pepitas.  The sausage itself is very intensely flavored, which is a good thing there are the mushrooms to mellow it out and cleanse the palate.  Some of that flavor comes from the charcoal that the sausage is cooked over.

Vanilla Custard

Being quite stuffed mostly from the appetizers, I decided to finish with something on the lighter side.  So here's a little custard with poached bananas, watermelon cubes, pistachios, and cardamom seeds.  My first impression of this is that it looks like a deconstructed yogurt parfait.  You got your yogurt (custard), some fruit (bananas and watermelon), and granola (cardamom and pistachio).  But obviously, this blows any parfait out the door.

There is one dish here that looks really good, but didn't get the chance to try: roasted lamb shoulder with pomegranate and chickpeas.  Once upon a time, it was only available as a part of one of their pre fixe courses.  Now, it's first come first serve.  It's usually meant for 3-4 people to eat, so downing it myself wouldn't be the smartest thing to do.  But hey, there is always next time.

How often do you see an Israeli restaurant?  Almost never.  This is truly a unique dining experience.  The diversity of the cuisine accurately portrays the diaspora of the country.


237 St. James Place
Philadelphia, PA 19106

Shoya Izakaya

 

One thing that I've always been trying to try is an authentic Japanese Izakaya.  Izakayas are the original gastropubs.  These are restaurants that serve a wide variety of food that goes well with beer or sake.  This place has a large menu with pictures of every item to give you an idea of what to expect.

This type of restaurant is the kind of place that I like.  First, the staff here is all Japanese, a true sign of quality and respectability.  I know this may sound discriminatory, but from my experience, this is true.  

There are items of many sizes for sharing or for yourself.  Being my first time here or at any izakaya, I go with a sampling of their small plates to get a sense of the food.

Takoyaki

This is a common street snack found in Osaka.  Even though there is a restaurant near my home where I can get this, I’ve actually never had this before.  These are octopus balls with batter served with rice seasoning, oftaku sauce and kewpie mayonnaise.  It’s best to eat them right away when there piping hot.  It may sound ridiculous since the batter is still liquefied and feels like lava in your mouth.  The one thing that bummed me out there is that they didn’t add any bonito flakes or katsuobushi.

Kushiyaki

This is another izakaya staple: grilled meat and sometimes veggies on a stick.  This plate has mushrooms, chicken wings, cherry tomatoes wrapped in bacon, chicken with scallions, and yakitori.  The grilling over the charcoal gives everything a nice crust, even the bacon.  The tomato and bacon is a very interesting combination.  Even though I don't like cherry tomatoes, I found the combination of bacon fat and tomato juice to be perfect.  The fat mellows the tartness of the tomato.

Hamachi Kama

This is part of the collar of the yellowtail that is grilled and served with grated radish and peppers.  The collar is surrounded by cartilage, which retains the moisture in the flesh.  One bite through the crust and inside is some of the moistest fish meat ever.  This was so good I even ate the fins, which crunch like chips.

Tako no Sunomono

Strangely enough, I ended my meal with the appetizers.  This is a traditional salad of two types of seaweed, cucumbers, and octopus over rice wine vinegar.  This would have a great way to wet the appetite due to the sour kick from the vinegar.  But I guess it works as a palate cleanser as well.

Steamed Uni Sushi

This was one of their daily specials.  Instead of being served cold, it is quickly steamed until warm.  The steaming brings out the flavor of the uni and is, in my opinion, a better pairing with the sushi rice.  Sea urchin has a flavor that is hard to describe since it is so unique.  The rice is just as important or more important than the fish or seafood on top of it, depending on the sushi chef who you ask.  

There was still so much more I wanted to try, but I wasn't going to destroy my wallet or my stomach. And I felt that it wasn't the greatest spread to a good idea.  But hey, I got to try takoyaki for the first time.  To be honest, this is not the greatest izakaya in the world.  I'm sure there are places that use better ingredients and better techniques.  But this was good enough for a first try.  Authentic Japanese food, like in much of the country, is not easily accessible.  There is so much more to Japanese than sushi.  Just see for yourself.  I only just scratched the surface.

6035 Peachtree Rd, Ste A101

Doraville, GA 30360

Eagle's Restaurant

When in the South, one should eat the food of the South.  And there's no better example of Southern food than soul food.

Soul food originated from the African slaves.  Being the subservient class, many of them were the ones doing the cooking for their owners in addition to cooking for themselves.  Once the Civil War ended and the 13th and 14th Amendments were established, these food traditions were only passed down through Black families while the rich Whites were left with nothing since they didn't know how to cook.  For a time, white men could neither jump nor cook.  Moral of the story: learn how to cook for yourself and others regardless of who you are or where you come from.  It's a very valuable life skill.

The food scene in Birmingham, like much of the South, is based heavily on soul food.  The most common type of establishment to get this is the "meat and 3".  As the name says, you get a choice of meat with 3 side dishes.  There are some well known ones in town like Niki's West, which was established in 1957 and has grown into one of the largest restaurants in the area.  But my choice for a meat and 3 is Eagle's Restaurant, which looks the same as it did since 1951.

Eagle's Restaurant is a dingy, tiny, and historic shack near the industrial area of town. The surrounding area has probably seen better days.  Boarded up homes, an unpaved parking lot, and an abandoned gas station are all nearby.  I remember walking into the restaurant feeling quite uncomfortable.

Right as you walk in, there are a few booth seats, an arcade machine to the left, and an old TV in the back.  But I felt right at home when I saw the small but amazing selection of food.  There were smothered pork chops, beef liver, chicken wings, meatloaf, yams, black eyed peas, and the ubiquitous collard greens among others.  But there is one thing that brought me here: oxtails. 

With the meat, my 3 are collard greens, candied yams, and cornbread.  Once I took a bite, I was instantly hooked.  It was the best preparation of oxtail I've ever had.  The oxtails were really tender having been cooked down at a low temperature for a long time.  But then again, for a tough cut like the oxtail, it's probably the only way to go in order to soften the meat.  The sauce actually gelatinizes onto the meat, giving it another layer of texture.  It was so good I quickly forgot how the scorching humidity was burning me.  While it is starting to cool in the North in the fall, the Deep South still feels like a tropical jungle.

To balance the meal, I choose some veggies that also received the same love and care as the oxtails.  The collards are cooked in the Southern way with bone-in meats to give it a smoky flavor.  The yams are really sweet and thick.  It is cooked down with lots of sugar and butter.  Sounds like something Paula Deen would make.  Since they are located near a farmer's market, they have access to some of the freshest ingredients every day.

Eagle's serves a different selection of food every day of the week, expect for Saturdays when they're closed.  Open 10:30am-3:30pm Central Time.

2610 16th Street N
Birmingham, AL 35204