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Food, Folks, Fun & Falafel at Fadi’s
By Michael Anderson and Anthony Lowenberg
Continuing on our monthly quest to find new and different restaurants for the young lawyers of Dallas to check out (as well as coming up with clever, alliterative titles like the one you see above), this month we decided to review Fadi’s Mediterranean Grill, nestled snugly into KnoxPark Village at Knox Street and Central Expressway. There are other Fadi’s locations in far North Dallas and Frisco, and there are two in Houston, for those of you who prefer your cuisine with a side of humidity and smog. Oh - traffic – Houston has really bad traffic too! Anyway, yes, we’re reviewing a chain restaurant, but unlike McDonald’s, this place won’t cause your health to plummet drastically after eating there for thirty days straight (uh-oh, the Hamburgler would like a word with us).
The big problem with the KnoxPark location is the Darwinian struggle that is trying to park there. The cars in the parking lot are squeezed together like they’re at a monster truck rally waiting for Bigfoot to roll over them. Pretty much the only way you’ll find an open spot is by playing parking lot stalker and following someone to their car, which also happens to be a great way to meet new friends! Anyway, the restaurant is worth the hassle (and the potential harassment claims).
The service is cafeteria-style and the d?cor of the restaurant is laid-back Middle Eastern with lots of light brown and cream-colored tones and multi-colored tiled tables. While the cafeteria line set up is straight forward, it often leads to a bottleneck at the beginning of the line while everyone tries to decide what they want off the menu before they begin. This is understandable since there are around twenty different types of appetizer/dip/veggie items to choose from, about ten meat dishes and several different kinds of sandwiches as well – it’s a regular Middle Eastern smorgasbord (of course, technically, a smorgasbord is a traditional Swedish meal involving meatballs and pickled herring, but you get the drift)! Sandwiches and meat dishes on their own cost $4-5, appetizers are $3-4 for individual portions and desserts are about $1.50. One way to avoid making the difficult decision of what to get is to order either the sampler or the vegetarian sampler. At $11 and $9, respectively, you get to try a little of everything along the line (minus the meat, if you get the veggie platter, in case you were unclear on the concept), which we’ve learned from experienced is more than enough food for even two people to eat. And if you’re really hungry, or you just want to amaze your friends with how much food you can put on one plate, on weekends, Fadi’s offers an all you can eat special that includes a drink and dessert for $14. All of this adds up to a whole lot of food for not a lot of money (and, in case you haven’t noticed, we prefer it that way). But, is the food any good?
It’s not good, almost without exception, it’s great! The hummus and baba ghanouge are both creamy and tasty, and the salads are crisp and fresh. Perhaps the best items on the menu are the hot vegetables dishes: the saut?ed eggplant and spinach have lots of flavor and the fried cauliflower is so tasty it makes you wonder why you never ate it as a kid. Freshly baked pita bread is continuously added to the bread station on the line (try to time it so a fresh batch is added as you pass by). The meat dishes are very good as well – the baked chicken was flavored with garlic and rosemary. The meat was tender, juicy and tasted wonderful. The “sandwiches” come tightly wrapped in pita bread, filled with a variety of, uh, fillings. We tried the lamb kabob and the falafel, both of which were filling. If the all-you-can-eat route is too much for your to bear, a sandwich and one side (something light, like the tabouli) is filling enough, and should leave you full. Drinks are either fountain soda or you can choose from several fruit juices (try the magic juice, it’s magically delicious… uh oh, the Leprechaun would like a word with us). The desserts consist of different types of baklava and similar pastry-type items. They were a little drier than what we’ve had at other Middle Eastern places. Still, the compliments definitely outweigh the complaints, and, for the price, Fadi’s is hard to beat. We also want to give a special mention to Ann’s Caf?,a new Mediterranean place that just opened up downtown on Ervay between Elm and Main, and which we’ve heard great things about, but we were not able to check it out before our deadline.
So, the next time you’ve got a hankering for some hummus or can’t live without a kabob, brave the monster truck rally and head on over to Fadi’s. On our transactional gavel scale, where one gavel is a deal gone south and five gavels is a mega-merger, we give Fadi’s four gavels.
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