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.
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