Suburban Tasteland

Hole in the Wall Fattoush

After a day of shopping in Old Town, I left lunch in the capable hands of my friend KS. She settled on Old Towne Deli, a shabby little luncheonette on Washington Street. Admittedly, I was a bit worried as to what could possibly be redeeming about this place; I was expecting just a laundry list of cold and hot sandwiches and maybe a few standard issue salads. While those items do comprise the bulk of the menu, buried on subsequent pages of the menu were a couple of Greek deli surprises.

KS’s choice was one of these specialties called Our Famous Salad Sampler. The description didn't seem too remarkable (a simple salad with or without chicken), but her brave choice inspired me to find out what other specialties this place was hiding. Toward the end of the menu, I discovered their Athenian Chicken, confirmed by the cashier and a customer as being one of the most popular dishes. It involves several pieces of grilled chicken on a bed of yellow (saffron?) rice with pita, tzatziki (a light yogurt and dill sauce), and a small Greek salad. Though the chicken could have been more flavorful and much juicier, the meal really hit the spot, and the tiny salad was surprisingly refreshing.

KS’s salad on the other hand, was out of this world. In fact, the boring “salad sampler” moniker was totally misleading. The salad is actually a Mediterranean specialty called fattoush, which is a basic salad of Romaine lettuce, tomato, cucumber, green pepper and vinaigrette that is then enhanced with toasted pita chips and a boatload of sumac, a very mild sour burgundy-colored spice. It was so simple, but absolutely delicious and executed with the freshest ingredients, including a lemon herb vinaigrette. Diners have the option of ordering it with chicken, but KS improvised off-menu style by specially requesting the gyro meat (despite my initial skepticism). Ordinarily, I would consider it high sacrilege to top a fattoush salad with gyro meat, or any other meat for that matter, but the gyro meat was tender and tasty and actually went well with the hearty salad.

On my next trip, I will definitely get my own fattoush salad and also sink my teeth into the giant wedge of homemade baklava I saw chilling as I waited for my meal.

After a lazy afternoon of bumming around Old Town,
try an outstanding fattoush salad at:

Old Towne Deli
109 N. Washington Street
Alexandria, Virginia
(703) 836-8028

—AK

Ode on a Grecian Pastry

The next time you head over to grub Thai food at Rabieng, you should make a brief pitstop two doors down at Aphrodite Greek Imports. Of course, you may also want to check out Duangrat’s Asian Market, which is conveniently sandwiched between Aphrodite and Rabieng, and is incidentally also owned by the family behind the Rabieng and Duangrat’s Thai food empire. But today, we’re talking Greek and Mediterranean imports. Besides, we discovered that sometimes nothing goes down better after an onslaught of roasted Thai chilis than Greek pastries.

Aphrodite is just a sliver of strip mall storefront, but nevertheless has an impressive array of olive oils, dried fruits, nuts, and spices. They also had four or five different types of feta from Greek feta to Bulgarian feta to Egyptian feta. Some day, AK and I hope to be knowledgable enough about feta that we can easily discern the differences between Bulgarian feta and Egyptian feta. But that day, we chose to continue living in feta origin ignorance, as we were scouting for sweets more than for savories.

We picked out two unusual book-sized flats of what may be the Lebanese version of American brittle. One candy flat was comprised entirely of large flakes of coconut, sprinkled with golden raisins and pistachios, and bound together in a light sugar syrup. The second candy flat added an additional sprinkle of almond slivers to the mix. Both candies were tough and chewy, and a bit oily from the coconut, but ultimately a must for coconut fiends.

We also sampled another Lebanese import, a cookie-sized disc of roasted pistachios bound together with a candy syrup. Apparently, this item is called “Kisses”, as is evidenced by the logo featuring two green and yellow parrots using their beaks to suspend a heart emblazoned with the word “Kisses.” The pistachios had a wonderful roasted and smoky taste, which was leavened somewhat by the candy syrup.

Next, we had the proprietor wrap up a couple pieces of their basboussa and katayif pastries, as well as a thin cake-sized slice of halvah from one of their several loaves and cakes of fresh halvah.

The katayif was like a small fist of shredded wheat, sweetened and moistened with what may have been orange blossom syrup, and stuffed with chopped walnuts. I was surprised that it didn’t also have a layer of cheese, as is customary with most of the katayif that I’ve had, but this turned out to be a good thing. The cheese in katayif is typically bland and rubbery, and its presence really adds texture more than taste. And anyway, AK and I are big shredded wheat fans, so we hardly need a layer of cheese to enhance the katayif experience.

The basboussa, a small square of semolina cake with a few slivers of almond on top, appeared dry on the outside, but was surprisingly moist and saturated with orange blossom syrup. Basboussa may be the single most addictive Mediterranean pastry, as somehow the moist texture and the sweet and buttery semolina cake seem to continually beckon me back to the fridge for more.

And the halvah with its roasted pistachios fulfilled my semi-annual need for sweet sesame paste, but was not anywhere nearly as revelatory as the Macedonian halvah that AK scored at the food market in Grand Central Station a few years back.

Aphrodite appears to make many of its Greek pastries in house, as the proprietor, proud of their wares and mindful of our excessively gluttonous haul, insisted that we try one of their Greek cookies gratis before we left. It was a buttery almond cookie, similar to shortbread, with the only real sweetness coming from the powdered sugar. Next time, we’ll have to add a few of those to our tour of decadence.

Check out Aphrodite Greek Imports at:
5886 Leesburg Pike
Falls Church, VA 22041
(703) 931-5055

-AC