After having some wine and charcuterie next door with our neighbors Michael and Elizabeth, Andrea were just looking for someplace to eat in our neighborhood on this Friday evening. We rarely eat out on a Friday and often it’s elsewhere in the city. We started walking down to Dash which was completely packed and with a wait. We started walking down 24th and it was nice to see how lively our neighborhood is on a Friday night. Most restaurants were quite busy. We walked down to Saru to see if we could sneak in…no such luck; it was a 50 minute wait. So we walked down Church St. and ate at Bistro Ember which we have enjoyed on 2 other occasions. The restaurant features a Mediterranean/Turkish menu.
We each ordered a glass of wine, a Syrah from Turkey for Andrea and a Central Coast Albarino for me. Wines had very generous pours and were reasonably priced. We started with the meze platter which included the 4 dips – tzatziki, baba ganoush, a walnut dip, and muhammara (red pepper dip). Andrea’s favorite dip was the tzatziki. They were all generally decent although I like a bit more bite to my tzatziki and the flavor of the baba ganoush was a bit weak (Andrea described it as watery), but I did enjoy the walnut and red pepper spreads. I definitely preferred the meze we’ve had at Aziza and Dalida, but this was fine.
For our mains, Andrea went with the Ember kebab and I went with the Manti as an entree portion. The menu says that the manti is “mom’s recipe” made with braised short rib served with a tomato sauce, garlic yogurt, and mint oil. Good, but not great. Would have liked a bit more flavor out of the filling, the dough was just a bit to thick, and the sauce ended up being a bit watery. Andrea’s kebab though was fantastic. The lamb and beef kebab was fully flavorful and that made the dish.
All in all, it was a easy convenient meal for us on a nice Friday evening.
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