Dinner At Luxor Restaurant

Amy and I were heading to Luxor Restaurant for dinner tonight, and just as we came to the intersection of Prospect, Virginia, and Shelby, Amy asked how it was that the neighborhood of Fountain Square could support two Mediterranean restaurants. (The other is Santorini Greek Kitchen.) I did not know the answer to that, except to say that food is one of the two things other than plight that I think of when I think of Fountain Square - the other is Radio Radio.

We parked on the street in front of the restaurant and saw a lunch buffet advertised on the window. It took a few minutes for anyone to greet us when we walked in - for the record, the only two other customers were the first people to acknowledge our presence in the restaurant. By the time we got the wrong salads before the appetizer sampler we had chosen to split for an entrée, we both figured that it had to be that lunch buffet that was keeping them afloat. The restaurant is close enough to downtown that a lot of people could make that lunch buffet trip and get back to the office inside their allotted hour.

The appetizer sampler lets you pick four of the dozen appetizers they serve; Amy chose the gyro and the falafel, and I chose the spanakopita and the fattoush - described in the online menu (but not in the menu at the restaurant) as “[a] traditional Arabic salad with lettuce, mint, lemon juice, olive oil, cucumbers and tomatoes mixed with pita croutons.”

Before we get to the food, a quick word on the dining room - there are, maybe, half a dozen tables seating from two to eight people each, the walls are painted mostly a vaguely minty forest green, and the heating unit, hidden behind a wall somewhere to the immediate right of where we sat, was so loud when it started revving itself up that I was afraid for a moment that the whole place was coming down. When that puppy is going with a full head of steam, a tornado could meander down Viriginia Avenue, right outside the front door, and you would never know - at any rate, there would be no aural clue.

The buffet tables take center stage in the middle of the dining room, reinforcing my thought that the lunch buffet is what keeps them from going under. The space in front of the U-shaped buffet table arrangement is, presumably, where the belly dancing and Spanish flamenco take place during dinner on the weekends. Pointed down on that space is a bank of colorful track lights. Four shaded hanging lights were turned on about halfway through the meal as dusk stole the day away; those four lamps were red, green, yellow, and blue - making me thinking immediately that we should have been playing Uno.

The salads we got were small Greek salads, not the Village salads we had ordered, and they were about as pedestrian as it gets. I keep hoping that one of these days a Greek salad will be something more than a regular salad with crumbled Feta on top and oregano added to the vinaigrette. The only time this has ever been the case was at a place called Ben Ash in New York. It’s directly across 7th Avenue from the Carnegie Deli, but much less famous. Their Greek salad, which cost $19.99 three years ago, looks - I kid you not - like Minas Tirith, if you take away that jutting precipice from which Denethor flings himself. If Amy had brought three Multiplicity-like clones with her to the table that day, the foursome might have been able to finish that salad.

But back to the Luxor! Up to the arrival of the appetizer sampler, I was unimpressed - with the ambience, the service, and the food such that we had already had. But then the appetizer plate came; and I will say this with no reservation - great food can almost always trump everything else that sucks about a restaurant.

The falafels were crispy on the outside and very flavorful inside - though this version is made with fava beans (sans Chianti, because I know someone is going to think it) and cilantro to go with the standard parsley. Most falafel that I have had in the past starts with a base of garbanzo beans and parsley. The gyro meat was a bit dry and tasted like it was made more with beef than with beef and lamb, and it lacked the strong seasoning that is usually found in gryo meat.

The spanakopita was a rich golden brown and crispy, with a mostly-spinach filling that could have done with a bit more cheese. But the highlight of the meal, for sure, was the fattoush salad, a perfect combination of light flavors (lemon juice, cucumber, tomato, mint) and slightly heavier, earthy flavors (olive oil and pita croutons, which is just a cute way of saying “cut-up pita bread”) that pretty much exploded with flavor in every bite.

A bonus highlight was the little dish of tzaziki that came with the plate. Tzaziki is a traditional Greek dipping sauce made primarily with yogurt and cucumber, and a little bit of sour cream - but this version was heavier on the sour cream and had so much garlic in it that any self-respecting vampire would have been nervous just to smell it. The garlic and sour cream were pleasant additions that almost made the tzaziki the highlight of the meal.

I was ready to write this place off and never look back - before that appetizer plate came. Now I’m already thinking about the next time, and the Egyptian Koshary ($8.95), described on the menu as a “mix of rice, lentils, and macaroni served with tomato sauce and topped with caramelized onions.” The front of the menu says that they specialize in Egyptian food, so I have reasonably high hopes for this dish the next time around.

The appetizer plate was $14.95 and the little Greek salads were $3.95 each (which I thought was a bit steep), and we stuck with ice water, so the total bill with tax and tip was just under $30. Dinner with two entrées and a couple of drinks apiece would easily double that.

One last thing, just for a laugh - Meditarranean women apparently have absolutely no qualms about asking to hold your baby. This happened tonight with the woman who served us, and has also happened both times we’ve eaten at the Bosphorus Café - the first time we ate at Bosphorus, the woman actually picked Jackson up and then walked into another room with him. The women at both places were just as nice as could be, but there was that monentary twinge when the Bosphorus lady took him into the other room - Amy and I looked at each other, and both of our expressions said, “Did we really just let a stranger take our baby out of our sight?”

At the end of the day, then, I think that I would recommend Luxor Restaurant, though perhaps not highly. If you only have one chance to do Mediterranean in this part of the city, then you should go for either Santorini or Bosphorus (though Bosphorus is not actually in Fountain Square - it’s on south East Street just before the interstate, but it’s nearby enough to count, I think); but if you’ve been to both of those places, give Luxor a shot.