Someone's in the kitchen with garlic at Mediterranean Grill

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Food

Someone's in the kitchen with garlic at Mediterranean Grill

Saturday, November 6, 1999

By GREGORY ROBERTS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER RESTAURANT CRITIC

Not long after Bassam Aboul Hosn came to Seattle from Lebanon, his father put him to work at the family's Lebanese restaurant on Queen Anne.

"I was 14," Hosn said. "My first job was standing in the kitchen and peeling garlic."

Hosn rose to head chef at 19 and then detoured into mechanical engineering studies at WSU. But he's back in the restaurant business as owner of Mediterranean Kitchen in Bellevue, a 7-year-old spinoff of the Mediterranean Kitchen his father, Kamal, runs in Seattle.

Bassam Aboul Hosn traveled from Lebanon to Seattle to become the bright bulb -- of garlic -- behind the Mediterranean Kitchen in Bellevue. Meryl Schenker

Garlic still figures prominently in Hosn's life. There's a garlic bulb pictured on his business card. Braids of garlic hang on the walls of the commercial-district storefront he's transformed into a cozy space with soft lighting, lace curtains and Arabic music. And garlic emphatically flavors many choices on the dinner menu, especially the finger-lickin'-good Farmer's Dish ($13.95 dinner) of chicken wings marinated overnight in herbs and spices, charbroiled and drenched with a thick garlicky sauce atop a mound of saffron rice.

"I guarantee it's got more garlic in it than most people eat in a month," Hosn said.

There's garlic in the marinade for the grilled Chicken Shawarma ($10.95), too, but the tang in the tahini sauce counters the thrust. It's still a meal of saucy savor, a richly seasoned and rewarding plateful of white-meat chunks with crunchy red cabbage, onions and tomatoes spooned over rice.

The Farmer's Dish tracks a recipe passed down by Hosn's great-grandfather, but most of the preparations come from Kamal Hosn, who was a restaurant chef in Lebanon. He has reworked traditional Lebanese dishes for the two Mediterranean Kitchens.

Mediterranean Kitchen. 103 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, 425-462-9422. Hours: Lunch, 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Monday-Saturday. Dinner, 4:30-9:30 p.m. nightly. Beer and wine. All major credit cards. No smoking. Free parking in rear lot. Accessible.

"When you come to a Lebanese restaurant, everybody makes hummus," Bassam Hosn said, "but we add our own herbs and spices to it."

The Kitchen's creamy hummus is served as a side with dinner entrees, and it also shows up on the Mezze Tray ($15) appetizer platter, joining lemony tabbouleh, mild baba ghannoush, cucumber-tomato salad, the mint-garnished drained yogurt called labnie and wonderful, crunchy cauliflower crowns fried and dressed with tahini. For scooping the dips, there are warm rounds of pita bread brought in from California.

Not everything at Mediterranean Kitchen is soaked in garlic. Stink-free options include Kafta Kabob ($7.85), a robust blend of ground beef, parsley, onions and spices shaped into fat cigars for skewering and charbroiling, or marinated hunks of meat speared and broiled in the zingy Lamb Shish Kabob ($9.95).

Dinners come with soup and salad. Except for the pita, almost everything is made in-house. That includes the Baklava ($3.50), a flaky phyllo pastry layered with ground cashews and pistachios and drizzled with rosewater syrup.

"Ours is so light and delicious, you can eat 10 of them and still want more," Hosn said.

Well, maybe -- but only if you've skimped on the rest of your food, which is dished out in such abundant proportions that take-home boxes show up on tabletops almost as often as the tiny cups of potent Turkish coffee included in the price of a meal.