For the majority of last week, I was looking forward to a special dinner reservation that I had for a soon-to-open restaurant in The Galleria area. I was chomping at the bit for a great meal at a very well-respected restaurant.
I’ll save you the gritty details — it was a huge disappointment.
My Table reader John Nechman often posts photos of his meals, which isn’t at all uncommon on social media. In fact, some people find food posts one of the most annoying types of posts out there — the other 50 percent of us find them the most interesting. One thing John does do that keeps me following, however, is give details about the meal as a whole, as well as the establishment.
None of this difficult to do, but even I forget to post some details that a friend of mine might find useful if they want to know more about my Kodak-moment meal. Simplicity at its best, John uploaded a clean photo (above), the approximate location and his personal note. I immediately put this “pizza” on my personal list of things-to-eat and Googled from my iPhone. Yes, I stalked his post.
Zeyad Bakery is located at the far southeast corner of Dunvale and Richmond, with Zeyad Restaurant next door. Inside, the Muslim-owned shop looks, smells and sounds just as you might imagine — the smell of dough and enticing meat waft through the little pergola as your enter, and immediately you see a small selection of pantry basics — rice, dried herbs, spices and pickled vegetables — before you see the packages of bread, pita and trays of dessert directly ahead. (I wasn’t wise enough to snap many photos, but luckily these from Gazzer on Urban Spoon are excellent.)
As you can see, the menu (posted above the counter) doesn’t offer a wide variety of eat-in items. The restaurant next door, however, had many more offerings on the menu that was posted inside on the bakery wall as well. For someone unfamiliar with halal dishes, large signs with images mean it couldn’t be easier to make a quick selection, although the very friendly owner still gave us a brief description about our chosen items — the cheese pizza (cheese manakish, $2) and meat with egg pizza (meat and egg manakish, $2.50). Each “pizza” was made of a soft pita standing in for pizza dough and was about the size of our paper plates.
The cheese manakish consisted only of goat cheese with seasoning and olive oil, one of those quick snacks you could easily make for yourself in the oven, but don’t — and I could have eaten two. The saltiness of the cheese on the bed of fresh-baked pita reminded me of a feta grilled cheese sandwich more than a cheese pizza, since manakish doesn’t come with a tomato sauce base as pizza typically does.
While I love a thin, crispy pizza with an overplayed cracked egg on top, this egg and meat manakish was more like a slightly spongy fritatta of seasoned lamb, onions, peppers and herbs laid over pita dough, and it satisfied the need of those who want the robust pepper and herb flavors that marry so well with ground lamb. Sometimes I can’t eat a vegetarian meal. My body cries for meat.
While we ate in the back corner of the bakery, I was charmed to see several families pop in and out quickly to purchase fresh pita bread and desserts for dinner. The label on the fresh breads looked very familiar to me. You’ve probably seen Zeyad’s pita bread at Fiesta markets all over town.
My friend and I debated the pros and cons of grabbing a dessert: The desserts were beautiful and enigmatic, lined up on display with wisps of tan, buttery, crinkly phyllo and sprinkles of finely chopped pistachios decorating them. But we’d just gone to town eating pita-dough pizzas the size of our faces, so we opted to pass up dessert on this occasion, but to certainly return, as the images of hummus and chopped meat and various fresh breads being baked before our large eyes were three of several reasons to stop by again for a good, cheap dinner.
While we paid the check, the owner kindly forced a complimentary dessert upon us, in a to-go fashion — he must have read our minds. We tried to (politely) resist, but we were soon walking out with a styrofoam plate of baklava and plasticware. A nibble in the parking lot turned into a friendly fight for the last crumb. We couldn’t even get the AC going in the car before we’d made a mess of flaky heaven on ourselves — and the dessert disappeared.
Zeyad Bakery & Sweets 8261 Richmond, 713-339-3356 zeyadbakeryandsweets.com
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