Rafo's Cafe

We always stay at the same hotel in Burbank, the Holiday Inn Express. It's close to the freeway and pretty affordable.  Unfortunately there are way too many chain restaurants there that I wouldn't set foot in...Most of our stays have involved us driving out for dinner. Bert had dinner destination choosing duty and he picked a good one!

That night's dinner wold be in this strip mall...

Return to Soltan Banoo

Dessert ended up being a two part affair. After perusing her choices,

KD wanted to give Persian desserts a try, so off we went...

Soltan Banoo

After several years of always wondering what it would be like to eat here, we finally got to find out.

I'd always been curious about this cute little eclectic eatery. Our visit to Soltan Banoo constituted part two of my lunch with TC just a few doors down from Plumeria...

Parsian Market

[Update - Closed as of 2011]

This was one fun summer for me - trying all these places with Bert. This is Parsian Market which we love. We'd been here before in the past (see my original post here). This time we brought TC. If you haven't eaten here before, do it now! Parsian Market is on Convoy and it's a former McD's (you can tell by the shape of the restaurant). The shot below was taken while sitting at their outside patio facing Convoy. Bert got the Chicken Wrap. His gripe was that the lavash was kind of crumbly so when he took bites out of it, it would crack and the filling would spill out...If it wasn't so crumbly, he would have enjoyed it more. It seemed eating a salad wrap...It was chock full of vegetables (which is a good thing).
TC and I shared a combo - this was the beef Kebabs with rice and a chargrilled tomato. They put a wrapped pat of butter on the rice, which was already melted when we got it. That basmati rice is so good, but there's so much! They should have put two pats of butter!!!! The combo was also served with a small side salad of Persian cucumbers with lettuce and tomato.
I know I've eaten this before but I love it so much that I can't help but order it again! I never order chicken whenever I go out to eat...The beef kebabs had so much flavor. TC and I had a lot of fun wrapping bits of the lavash over small pieces of the kebab mixed with rice!!! Next time we go here (and there will definitely be a next time), I'll try something different like the walnut/vegetable stew or something. That sounded intriguing to me. Oh, all right! Who the fk am I kidding? I'm going to order the beef kebab combo!!!

Parsian International Market & Grill

[Update - Closed as of 2011]

We went here earlier today (I'm actually posting this more than 1 week later, so it's kind of wierd writing it like it just happened!) - one of my students recommended this place to me. She is of Iranian descent (born and raised here though) and says her parents go to this place to buy their ingredients for their food. She also gave me a take out menu and the items looked pretty good so we decided to check this placed out. Parsian Market and Grill is located on Convoy, If you are heading North on Convoy, it's past Ostrow, with a 7-11 on the opposite corner. If you hit Convoy Plaza strip mall (where Phuong Trang is), you've gone too far. As you can see by the shape of the restaurant, this place used to be a McDonald's. The "ordering" area is the same as it in in McD's, but there's a small row of fresh fruits and vegetables as well. In the corner (not pictured) near the bathrooms, they sell fresh bread (lahvosh and some other types). There's refrigerated sections for drinks and other perishable items.

We ordered our food and sat in the back where there are about 4-5 4-top tables. There is also an outside patio with covered tables (as seen in the first photo). Back here, on the end caps are stuff for tea. They take tea seriously here. They sold tea sets, tea biscuits, all kinds of boxed and loose leaf teas, etc.

Another shot from the back. You can see the tea pots there. They also sold rice cookers!

There were rows of Middle Eastern Products. "Sadaf" was one of the main brands. Here you can see Sadaf brand mint and quince/lemon syrup. I ended up buying some Sadaf seasoning mix for beef kabobs and chicken tandoori. Turns out I could have bought that at North Park Produce closer to home, but I didn't know at the time.

They sold all kinds of basmati rice. I never knew there was brown basmati rice. I bought a small 2 lb bag of white basmati rice ($4.99 - I'm not sure if that's a good deal or not). I may just try the brown variety next time I come back and I definitely plan to...

The dried fruit section. Man, they love sour cherry stuff here. This package though, were dried barberries, which is an ingredient I've seen in the rice they serve at Bandar.

So, our food finally comes after we're done browsing through the aisles. Not sure how long it took, but it was pretty quick. I ordered the Beef Kabob plate - yeah, I know, "safe", but I wanted to try it since I really liked what I had at Sadaf a few weeks ago. This was $7.99, about the same price as Sadaf's, but you don't have the downtown vibe to it. Here, it's two juicy and seasoned beef kabobs served with a char-broiled tomato, on top of a huuuuge bed of basmati rice. There was a bit of saffron tinted yellow basmati rice on top - very pretty. There was also a wrapped pat of butter on top of the rice and a big sheet of lahvosh. I'm kind of anal and I didn't like the butter on top of the hot rice because it was already melted by the time I unwrapped it. But who cares, it's going to melt anyways on the rice or the lahvosh, depending on how you eat it. Man, this was a lot of food! I only ate 1 kabob and barely made a dent in the rice. We took my leftovers home for TC to enjoy later.

My entree came with a small side of salad - Persian cucumbers, chopped tomatoes and iceberg lettuce in some sort of dressing. I normally don't eat salad with dressing, but I tried and liked this. I just tried to scrape off some of the dressing or ate the pieces that weren't as drenched.

Bert ordered the Chicken Kabob wrap ($4.99). It was seasoned chicken wrapped in lahvosh with tomato, onion, lettuce and pickles. Since he ate most of it and didn't throw up, I'm assuming that he liked and enjoyed his wrap. It was a sizable portion too.Here's a few of the items I bought at Parsian Market - The seasoning packets I mentioned earlier and some tea biscuits. Actually, I bought the biscuits because they said "Salamat" on it ("Salamat" means "Thank You" in Tagalog), but Salamat turned out to be a brand name. I think that word has an Arabic origin but I'm too lazy to look it up right now. The biscuits will be for Bert's coffee.

Here's a wanna-be Nutella, called Armella. It was $2.99, which is cheaper than Nutella. I compared the two later at home. It tastes pretty close to Nutella, but Nutella is a tiny bit more chocolatier (is that even a word?). But hey, this will taste good with those Salamat cookies.

I also bought some Chick Pea Flour since it was one of the ingredients for a recipe I saw on the back of the Tandooring Chicken seasoning packet. There wasn't a smaller package, but I bought it anyways because I just may use this to make fritters.

Their menu:

Oh yeah, beef!

Another look at their offerings:

We ended up going back here again, one week later (10/10). That time, I ordered the Beef Kabob wrap and Bert got the Beef Kabob plate. Next time we go (and we WILL), I want to try one of their stews because it has walnuts and pomegranates in it. I also tried to make basmati rice. I actually used my rice cooker. After washing the rice twice, I steeped some saffron threads in hot water and poured (the right amount) into the rice cooker. My rice came out quite fragrant and yellow! Good for a first try!

So, if you're ever in the Convoy area, check out this place. The people who work there are very nice. No one bothers you when you're eating. It's very mom and pop. There's a lot of cool ingredients and products to look at and/or purchase if you choose to do so.

Sadaf, Pinkberry

I'm finally getting around to posting this one week later! So, one week after Ranas, my same friend and I went downtown to the Gaslamp to try out Sadaf, a Persian restaurant. It's on 5th Avenue, on the opposite side of Bandar, another Persian place. Both of us had never been to Sadaf so that's why we decided to try it out. It was mid-week and the streets and restaurant was, thankfully, bereft of tourists.
The lavash (Flatbread) which you eat with butter. At another Persian place I've been to, they also give you a cut up onion. No onion breath today.

Their menu:

We had a small bowl of a complimentary soup appetizer. I'm not much of a soup person, but this soup was pretty good. It had carrots, lentils, onions and some other grain (I want to say barley, but I'm not sure it's barley). In any case, the soup was a good starter.

I ordered the Koobideh Kabob which are 2 "juicy charbroiled skewers of seasoned choice Lean Ground Beef" (description from the menu) which is served with yellow and white basmati rice, onions, and a charbroiled tomato. Man, this was a lot of food. I ate 1 and 1/4 of the meat and barely made a dent with the rice.

Beef kabob...

My friend ordered the Ghiemeh Bademjana, which is a "savory Stew of Italian Eggplant, Yellow Split Peas and a special Tomato Base, lightly spiced to perfection . Sauteed and seasoned chunks of Veal Shank are added with each serving". I didn't realize until after I cut and pasted the description that her entree had veal in it. I thought it was beef.

The veal (what I thought was beef):

We liked our entrees at the Persian place. The food is pretty much the same at Bandar but maybe just slightly more expensive. There's another Persian place I want to try out. One of my students recommended it to me, Parsian Market Place, on Convoy. It's a family run eatery and market. She even gave me a menu - she told me the portions are pretty big and the prices are good too. Plus, the added bonus is that it's in a market so you can buy those types of spices and ingredients if you wanted to replicate your meal. So, after our lunch (we ended up getting doggy bags for our leftovers), my friend called up her son to meet us for yogurt at the new Pinkberry at the Hard RockHotel (total rich Tourist trap). He works downtown at a law firm and made the trek down to the end of 5th Avenue. I know there's a Pinkberry in Hillcrest, but since we were downtown, my friend wanted to try this place out. I'd heard about Pinkberry and how it's popular and all, but I'm not really a fan of tart yogurt, but decided to give it a try.

There's only three flavors at Pinkberry. Depending on the flavor and the size, you can get toppings for .95 extra or if you upgrade to larger sizes, you can get up to 3 toppings which are included in the price. Here's the first flavor - Green Tea. This is my friend's. This is a Medium which is $4.50 (fk!) and you can get up to 3 toppings with this size. It was $3.50 for a small, but if she wanted 3 toppings, it would've cost more than $6! Damn marketing ploy to get you to order the larger size. Her toppings were the relatively healthy fruit trio of kiwi, mango, and blueberry. My friend didn't really like hers because she wasn't expecting the green tea to be so tart.

Her son (you can see his corporate outfit here) ordered his favorite flavor, or non flavor, as it was the Plain. I think he got the medium size with the 3 toppings (strawberry, blueberry and granola). He actually finished his. Neither my friend nor I finished ours.

The last flavor they offer in this overly hyped yogurt shack is coffee. But the difference is that this coffee flavor is TART. This is a size small with one topping, which happened to be almonds. I wasn't expecting sliced almonds; I thought it would be chopped. The texture is a bit different I think when it's chopped pieces as opposed to thin sliced. The coffee flavor was not really pronounced. Rather, it was a 'hint' of coffee flavor which tasted strange to me because I don't equate coffee with being tart, but rather bitter (I like bitter!).

The seating is minimal at the downtown Pinkberry. There are only 3 tables with three chairs each. It's nice and bright inside and there are shelves filled with cute contraptions like ice cream scoopers and such. Not that I'd buy them. The servers were all young teenagers. I wasn't sure where to order because a group of young girls was ahead of me vaccillating on their orders and kind of stretching the patience of one of the servers. I asked the kid behind the counter if he could take my order and he said, "No". He didn't even give me an explanation (well, at least I expected one) of where to order or that I needed to wait. I didn't see him or the other girl behind the counter as being helpful, or productive. They could have taken our order while the group ahead of us was deciding.

Anyhow, I know they probably only get paid minimum wage and don't give a toss, but as representatives of this "upscale" yogurt place, you'd think they'd have more courtesty or customer service. But that wasn't the case. I still like the yogurt place near us. You can control your portion and the toppings (.38 an ounce too). Nuyo (formerly Pure) also has 10 flavors to choose from - regular ones as well as tart ones. I like having choice. I remember reading somewhere that Pinkberry only had 2 choices, so I was leery of just the Green Tea and Plain (don't like either). But the tart coffee? Bleh.