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Restaurant review: Zaytoun Mediterranean Grill brings a novel cuisine to New Tampa

 
Zaytoun’s Mixed Grill comes with grilled kufta, shish kebabs, veggies and rice.
Zaytoun’s Mixed Grill comes with grilled kufta, shish kebabs, veggies and rice.
Published Aug. 31, 2015

NEW TAMPA

When I lived in New Tampa there wasn't much more than Olive Garden, Red Lobster and Chili's. These days those Tampa Palms and Hunter's Green folks have a whole raft of appealing and sophisticated independent restaurants. Zaytoun Mediterranean Grill is the newest of the bunch, having opened its doors in Cross Creek in June. Owner Bilal Saleh is an engineer, his brother a physician who built a little shopping plaza adjacent to the Publix. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a restaurant nearby that served the Syrian cuisine of the brothers' homeland? So they built one.

Calling it more broadly Mediterranean, Saleh serves adaptations of his wife Abida's recipes. Syrian food is fairly underrepresented in this area, but shares a number of dishes and flavors with neighbors Lebanon and Turkey. The bright, cheery restaurant is presided over by a young staff that, while enthusiastic about the food, doesn't have the deep reservoir of knowledge that would help introduce what to many diners will be a novel cuisine.

The best of the beverages is a minted lemonade ($2.75). The rest of the limited drink list (no alcohol, and they don't allow BYOB) is sodas, an intensely tannic hot Turkish tea and coffee drinks.

Can't decide what's first? The sampler platter of appetizers ($16.99) is a doozy of an introduction, with a parade of small bowls and plates: There's thick and tangy yogurt labneh drizzled with a bit of olive oil and topped with a flurry of dried mint leaves, a familiar but nicely balanced bowl of hummus, another of tahini-swirled eggplant baba ghanouj, and a third of more exotic Syrian muhammara dip made with mild Aleppo peppers (if you read food mags, these are the "it" peppers of 2015), ground walnuts and bread crumbs. It also comes with a big stack of just-baked pita, a pleasantly parsley-dominant tabbouleh and little cylindrical kibbeh — a mix of bulgur wheat, minced onion and ground beef and lamb that is molded (often in Syria into football or torpedo shapes) and then deep-fried, its exterior crunchy and inside tender. Any one of these really strike your fancy? They're all offered individually as appetizers, too.

Much of the entree excitement emanates from the custom-built stone oven. A passel of rosy lamb chops ($19.99) balances smokiness with a lemony perfume, the chops lending their juices to a scoop of white rice and charry peppers and onions (some of the onions weren't cooked enough and were thus overly sharp, but a quibble) and a juicy roasted tomato. Skewers around which ground beef and lamb, augmented by minced onion and herbs, have been molded, called kufta ($15.99), get the same plate-mates as the lamb. Have any of that labneh or muhammara left? Pile it on.

Dessert requires some patience and fortitude. The best offering takes 20 minutes to cook, so cool your jets. Kanafeh ($7.99), cousin to the more familiar Greek kadaifi, is a cheese-based pastry with a shell of crispy shredded wheat, the whole thing drizzled with an intensely sweet sugar syrup and what tasted like a little rose water, and then topped with crushed pistachio. It actually is shown off most effectively against a cup of that bitter-tannic Turkish tea ($1.75) served in an ornate cup with a heat-preserving metal cap.

Much of the food at Zaytoun is from humble ingredients and without a lot of embellishments or pretense. And while some of the flavors are exotic (try the soup made of freekah, which is a green wheat cereal), the dishes have a uniform homemade feel to them. Another score for New Tampa.

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Contact Laura Reiley at lreiley@tampabay.com or (727) 892-2293. Follow @lreiley on Twitter. She dines anonymously and unannounced; the Times pays all expenses.