Sometimes serendipity is a factor when I'm on the job. A case in point: Pita Place, which I discovered after checking out a so-called Turkish restaurant, the Sultan's Table, on the corner of Spring Mountain and Jones.
It was four in the afternoon and Sultan's Table was dark, so I walked across the parking lot to Pita Place, a free-standing building with faded blue brick walls, blue and white checked tables with plastic covers, and Middle Eastern-sounding music blaring in my ears.
Shortly after this inauspicious start, I noticed how good the food looked. I saw a small salad buffet behind a counter fronting the open kitchen: bright, vivid fare like eggplant caviar, something Israelis call Turkish salad, hummus, tabbouleh, a brace of pickled vegetables, and many other surprises.
Then I caught a whiff of the chicken shawarma, spiced chicken rotating on an electric spit, and of meats being finished on a grill. It was at then that I saw several pictures mounted on the wall, featuring none other than Mayor Oscar Goodman, a favored customer.
It turns out that this restaurant is not new, but the chef, Samuel Blum, is. Blum studied cooking in his native Israel and at the Los Angeles Culinary Institute, and he is a major talent.
He took over the kitchen four months ago, adding a number of dishes eaten in Israel but rarely found here, such as a meatball soup native to Yemen; malhwa, a delicious grilled flat bread; and the oddball breadstuff jahnoon, which also has a Yemenite pedigree.
What I find really interesting here is the contrast between what typical Israelis eat, and the Ashkenazi Jewish deli fare, rooted in Poland, Lithuania and Austria-Hungary. The two cuisines are not even vaguely similar. True Israeli fare doesn't rely on a whole lot of meat, except for kabobs and such. Meals are eaten with six or seven small salads, and here, a salad buffet is served with entrees for a dollar.
It's the best dollar you'll ever spend. One day, the waitress served carrots with a cumin scent, pickled cabbage, an ultra-garlicky eggplant puree, ripe olives, and the Turkish salad, which is like a smashed tomato and bell pepper dip.
Pay a few dollars extra and you can add goodies like hummus, tabbouleh and wonderfully delicate stuffed grape leaves, which have a rich, lemony herbed rice stuffing. Whatever route you take, it will lead to one of Blum's meaty kabobs, an unusual special, or a dish like the Mediterranean sampler, a true moveable feast.
The sampler comes with Moroccan cigars, deep fried pastry cylinders with spicy minced chicken in the centers; chubee, little torpedoes made from bulgur wheat with ground beef fillings; bourekas, small cheese and meat pies; and balls of falafel, the Israeli national snack, made from chick-pea flour, the sesame paste tahina and enough garlic to ward off vampires for a generation.
Blum also uses a ton of garlic in his beef shish kebab, which is really a dish he learned to make from his Romanian grandfather. In Romania, these grilled beef bombs are called mititei, and since there is no Romanian restaurant in town, this is the only place to eat such a dish. (In Europe, you'd eat the kabobs with fries, but an Israeli would choose rice or couscous. Blum hedges his bets and offers a choice of all three.)
And so it goes here. Malhwa might seem pricey at $6.50, but it takes a lot of effort to make and is probably the most delicious dish Blum serves. It's rolled in several layers before being griddled, and then served with hard-boiled egg and a tomato puree jazzed up with houk, a fiery red pepper paste that is easily the most spicy condiment an Israeli eats.
Yemeni soup is a rich broth, laden with cooked carrots, celery, onion and golf ball-sized meatballs, a mix of meat and chickpea flour. That strange dish called jahnoon, which Blum makes only on Sundays, is a long, glutinous tube of bread, served steamed, with the same condiments as the malhwa.
Any of the meats can be had in a pita sandwich with tahina sauce. I highly recommend the Romanian style beef kabobs and the chicken shawarma, but they both have more than their share of garlic. You'll probably have to ask for za-atar, complimentary baked pita bread sticks coated with thyme, garlic and other spices.
Desserts include bavaria, a creamy pudding layered with Bavarian cream and chocolate syrup; baklava; and my favorite sweet served here, mooflata; curly fried crisps sprinkled with sesame seeds and drenched with a light rosewater-scented sugar syrup.
Throw in Blum's clove, nutmeg and cardamom-scented Turkish coffee or his tall, cool rosewater lemonade, and it all adds up to an exotic experience, food my Yiddish bubbe (grandmother) never tasted in her long, bountiful life.