I gathered a group of eight together to try out the Syrian food at Alshami, prompted because of a couple of good, personal recommendations.
In advance, I arranged for the chef to prepare two dishes not on the menu: oozi (rice and ground beef stuffed into a pastry shell) and makdous (stuffed eggplants).
We also ordered from the menu:
Muhammara
Foul
Sujouk
Beef shawarama
Chicken shawarma
Eggplant fattah
Bamya (okra)
Lubie (green beans)
Zaatar manakeesh
They also brought to the table pita and labne.
If i realized in advance that these were the same people behind Layalina, the former restaurant in this space, I might not have organized this. Despite it being a beloved fixture for years, I always thought Layalina a bit plain.
The okra, green beans, and sujouk all came with a sauce of canned tomatoes. I had visions of fat, juicy freshy grilled sujouk, but instead we got crumbly, overcooked sausage drowned in a tomato sauce. We had to ask what the dish was as the waitress put it on the table. You should not misidentify soujouk as muhammara.
Foul was as plain as can be with the beans served whole and tasteless. Did they have any flavor at all?
The big ball of stuffed rice, oozi, was a bit cold inside and also very plain. This suffered mightily in comparison to a similar dish at Erbil, the Kurdish restaurant in Fairfax, where it comes out piping hot with fluffy rice and well seasoned lamb.
Really nice flavor on the beef shawarma, but the texture (it was served cut into sticks of beef) was odd. The pita was cold, tough and worse than supermarket quality.
Everything else we had was serviceable.
Strangely, though, almost everyone else really liked the meal. I didn’t take any photos, partly because of an odd purple light on my side of the table. So if someone else posts them, you’ll get a glimpse of what we were served.
