One of the advantages of being us is that we're relatively young and totally crazy, and occasionally we decide to do things like leave our respectable job and enroll in five classes of "stuff we think is neat" (despite the fact that we completed our BA just a couple years ago), and then we remember that we have champagne taste on a Schlitz budget, and we feel a little guilty about squandering our life savings at Central Market, so we get a job, and soon enough we have no free time and no days off or weekends, and bread and cheese have become our two main food groups, and we miss our days of decadent gluttony in the name of "journalism" (apparently, we also miss good sentence structure and proper diction).
And so today, we present to you Miscellaneous Musings of the Mediterranean.
Istanbul Grill
We went here for lunch last week and ordered the vegetarian lahmacun platter. For those of you unfamiliar with these things, that means that we had charbroiled eggplant rolled in a very thin pizza-style dough, baked to deliciousness in their brick oven. We hadn't eaten at Istanbul Grill in ages and now we really can't remember why. Our eggplant dish was heavenly but not heavy, gratifying but not greasy (in other news, the Alliteration Deity is about to smite us). Our dining companion had the not-so-vegetarian Iskender kebab ("lamb dish with yogurty sauce"), and despite the healthy portions, he was so impressed by the food that he ordered himself three desserts. Of course, he only got to eat 1.5 desserts' worth. Not that we would ever invoke the cause of journalistic integrity.
Of the three desserts, the gold medal winner was the baked rice pudding, which was served warm (and warmly, did we mention the friendly service?) in its own special bowl. We enjoyed cracking the skin that had formed on the top (we're glad that desserts other than creme brulee can provide us with this sort of satisfaction). We scraped the bowl clean in between sips of Turkish coffee. We ordered ours unsweetened, but we don't recommend doing that unless you like your coffee like our dark, bitter heart. Dining Companion preferred his sweetened.
Istanbul Grill
5613 Morningside Dr (713) 526-2800
photo by flickr user celikmetre
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