Kabab Café

[Steve R.]

Three of us were there Sat. night and strayed from our usual orders, getting the cucumber salad, the warm fresh beets salad, a whole red snapper and a lamb prepared differently than his usual pomegranite sauce. These were all excellent but perhaps the best dish of the night was goat, which he says he marinates for 48 hours... tender, tasty dish. At any rate, it's always $40/person, regardless of what you eat and well worth it. But you definitely have to get to know his style and avoid the dish "sameness".

[gastrodamus]

i don't know if our table got carried away but we spent $70/person. i suppose we ordered a lot for three. i agree with the slow service but we enjoyed ali's jokes, like the way he refers to the duck dumplings as daffy duck. excellent dish, btw. lamb cheeks, lamb testicles, brain, heart, liver and veal sweetbreads are about as tasty as offals get. i agree w/BryanZ's assessment of the dishes tasting similar, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing as it never felt like we were eating the same dish over and over. we also had sardines, duck dumplings and cow hoof adding contrast in between the offals, which i think helped reset the palate.

ali told us that if we were to give him an advance notice, he'd prepare chicken heads, which apparently he and his brothers used to fight over as kids.

[BryanZ]

For three people that seems an absurd amount of food. That's not a condemnation, mind you, more admiration. We had to wait for our table, so I had a little snack at the pastry shop up Steinway, but I was plenty full after the food we received.