Gazala Place

My co worker and I have been ordering from Gazala's Place every day for the past few weeks. We are completely obsessed with her tabouli salad, chak choka, and delicious turkish coffee. All of the food there is made with fresh ingredients and love you can taste. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a homemade Middle Eastern meal.

The food at Gazala's is a mixed bag. The chicken sandwich was delicious perfectly seasoned with a nice charred flavor. but it comes in their strange version of pita which I've never seen in the middle east. Think a very thin wheat tortilla. Not very tasty. The labbneh was just ok. Not pasty, but not creamy or tangy. You'll get a decent meal here, but at a huge cost. A can of diet coke was $2.50!?! I can get one at the deli next door for 75 cents. All in all, you can find better middle eastern food nearby at a much cheaper price. Skip this place.

Gazala herself is a lovely, hard-working woman who cares about her food. Never having experienced Druze cuisine I asked her for some suggestions. My dining companion and I had an absolutely delicious bureka filled with goat cheese and sun dried tomatoes. The pastry was flaky, buttery and light. The filling was rich and flavorful. Black and toasted sesame seeds on top was a nice touch. The side salad was, I admit, uninspired but the lamb 'pizza' on a round of corn meal dusted crispy dough was very tasty. All in all a solid lunch that left me thinking about that bureka for the rest of the week. I'll be back...

My lunch at Gazala was so poor that I registered at MenuPages just to complain. I had read a rave review about the pita bread mine was small, half undercooked and half burned, and completely without flavor. The hummos had no flavor at all and felt like eating bland toothpaste. The salads are iceberg lettuce chopped up with hothouse tomatoes and a little oily vinaigrette. The woman who owns the place is slow and not at all helpful with the menu (she shrugs a lot).

Gazala's Place is the best authentic Middle Eastern restaurant I have found in Manhattan. I discovered it thanks to a favorable review in the New York Times and the fact that it is in my neighborhood (9th Avenue in the 40s), which has quietly become one of the best spots in the City for ethnic restaurants. The proprietor, Gazala, makes fresh every day a Druze specialty called saag pita, a bread made of wheat flour that is thinner and more flavorful than the pita we are familiar with from the supermarket. My favorite dishes are hommus tahini, babaganoush, foule mouddamas, kibbe, and falafel. The service is great . It is a small place and they treat you like family. They even let you bring your own wine, etc., which contibutes to making the experience a bargain.

This place is the most welcoming restaurant I've been to in NYC and the food is excellent. And its BYO . Can't beat it.

We went there after a recommendation from a friend. The food was excellent, especially the Labane and the ground beef kebab.