Mamlouk
We ate at Mamlouk last night, a Middle Eastern restaurant in the East Village. Very good food: it’s a fixed menu, along the lines of, say, Thali, where you sit down and they just bring you food. It starts with a sort of tapas of hummus, baba gannouj, and so on, and proceeds to a salad, lentil soup, and a combination of meat, seafood and vegetarian entres (lamb, sea bass, moussaka), and finishes with a baklava. These dishes probably vary a bit from day to day, depending on what they want to prepare.
Dinner at Mamlouk was for a birthday party of one of Grace’s med school classmates, a total of more than a dozen people. The restaurant’s basement space seems to be where they put large groups, and it seems to be a popular birthday party venue, at least on a Saturday night, since there at least two other groups breaking out into “Happy Birthday” while we were there. All in all, it was very good food for relatively little money — about $30 per person. We’ll have to try it again with a smaller group. The upstairs also seemed quieter.