Restaurant Review: Caspian Grill
Based on recommendation from Scoble, we decided to try the Caspian Grill Persian restaurant in Seattle’s U-District last week. Overall it was excellent, and we’ll be back.
Location: Caspian Grill ison 5517University Ave, just north of 55th St, on the west side of the street. Parking is on the street.
Food: The waiter brought out pita bread with a quarter onion to start, andwe ordered the baba gannoush appetizer to start. Every table has a big shaker of paprika, and the baba gannoush was great; not too runny, and not too dry. We didn’t order hommous, but the baba gannoush is a good indicator of how they do on hommous. For main course we ordered the lamb/beef kebab platter and the chicken fesenjan. Fesenjan is a stew with the bird slow-cooked for a long time in a sweet pomegranate broth. The meat falls right off the bone, and tasted really good. And the kebabs were perfect. Restaurants in Seattle measure how “middle eastern” they are by how much garlic they use, and kebab/tawook are all terrible at every place I’ve tried. You are much safer in general to stick with Tandoori grilled meats rather than go to a place that advertises “mediterranean”, “middle-eastern” or even “Greek” (and the “shish tawook” they serve at Cedars in U-District tastes suspiciously like tandoori chicken on a skewer). Anyway, the grilledlamb and beef at Caspian Grill are as delicious as any I’ve ever had anywhere — and by far better than any I’ve had in the Seattle area before. No room for dessert.
Ambiance: The restaurant is clean and tastefully decorated, withplenty of space between tables. The place was pretty crowded, with two big family gatherings and lots of boisterous happy conversation. It was a Friday night, and by sheer coincidence, we got there just a few minutes before the belly dancing started. The music was awesome, and the dancing was pretty cool. The dancer (Aziza) even danced with a lighted candle balanced on her head, demonstrating that her head could remain stationary while every other part of her body was moving. It’s up to the parents to explain to kids that this is not to be tried at home; and I even observed one parent instructing his son how to properly put dollar bills in the dancer’s waist band. After the dancing finished, there was a pause of about 20 minutes and then some live jazz which was very pleasant.
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Last week I also made it to two blog-related social meetups. First I went to the Sam Ruby meet (with Sam Ruby cancelling at the last moment). I talked with Ted Leungfor about an hour, and then John Porcaro and Dare showed up. My date insisted on leaving before Scoble or Phipps showed up, which was a shame. Especially since one of them might have had a digital camera and snapped a picture of me, in which case I would have proof that Ted’s camera was malfunctioning and I don’t really sport a moustache or use coal-based lipstick.
Then on the following friday, I got dinner at Claim Jumper with Paolo and his wife Angela, and we did some shopping together. Paolo was showing off his hours-old Toshiba wifi PPC, and we talked about all sorts of interesting topics including XBox Live gaming, custom-written replacements for Windows Media Center, and enterprise architecture. Paolo is with Sierra Systems, asystems integratorI worked with often when I was in MSFT’s field organization. I always liked the people from Sierra since they are very pragmatic about how things arein the “real world” and they normally go in with a “hook your stuff together” play instead of a “rip and replace with the one true architecture” play. This tends to work better for MSFT (and of course better for the customers), and leads to Sierra having people with whom I can swap war stories about programming in Pick or M204.