Gillian C.
Yelp
After walking by this cafe a number of times and then reading so many great reviews on here, I made an in-person reservation for my birthday dinner. I love Persian food, and it had been years since I'd been to a Persian restaurant. I loved the decor and thought this would be a great place to enjoy my birthday. Sadly, it didn't deliver.
For one thing, the service was awful. The server pretty much ignored us, and the movement from course to course was so slow we wound up there for two and a half hours. That's a long time to be sitting in a restaurant if they aren't keeping you busy with multiple courses. The server offered only basic descriptions of the dishes available and wasn't able to answer my questions about how dishes were prepared. She kept saying "I don't know," but she never offered to go to the kitchen and find out. I wasn't sure if it was simply that she didn't know the English words for some foods, but she knew that my companion spoke fluent French--as she chose to speak with him only in French-- and didn't attempt to answer my questions with his help either, so her inability to describe the food remains a mystery--and a shortcoming-- to me.
We ordered an appetizer and a salad to start. The salad--red cabbage and apples in a vinaigrette--was really more like a coleslaw. Uninteresting and just okay. The eggplant appetizer, a kind of pate similar to baba ghanouj in texture but flavored with pomegranate juice, was delicious, the standout of the meal as far as I'm concerned.
My companion's chicken entree was okay, with a nice sauce, but my lamb stew--which didn't come with any rice, though the menu had seemed to imply that all entrees did-- was flavorless and the lamb, tough. This stew didn't have any seasoning that said "Persian" to me. It was cooked in a sauce with a tomato base and some vegetables like carrots and potatoes. I didn't taste any spices, not even salt. I stole some of my companion's extra sauce that had come on the side with his chicken and poured it over, just so I could enjoy some flavor; at least that sauce was flavorful and delivered on its Persian roots.
The fruit compote dessert was nice. The tiny apricots--about the size of gooseberries--were infused in a rosewater sugar syrup. It would have been nice if the pits had been removed, but the fruits were served whole and were nevertheless enjoyable.
Overall, I was very disappointed, as I had looked forward to a special birthday meal. I don't see the cause for all of the high praise for this place here on Yelp, and I surely won't be back during the remainder of my monthlong stay in Montreal.