Lani T.
Yelp
We're from the San Francisco area where there is no shortage of great Mediterranean eateries--and Hamtramck Royal Kabob offers some of the best we've ever had.
The restaurant is casual and feels more like a diner. They offer standard Mediterranean fare so no huge surprises on their menu, but the food is absolutely fantastic. Even though it was a Thursday night, the place consistently had people coming in for take-out or eat-in meals.
When you eat in, they offer free on-site-baked pocket breads, which come with a vegetarian "garlic butter" that's absolutely to die for. We finally asked our server what it contained because it tasted so good, and the recipe is very simple--garlic, olive oil, a bit of lemon and jalapeño. You can see very small bits of green from the jalapeño, but it's not hot at all. Just a ton of flavor. If you like garlic, you will LOVE this. What a great option to plain butter (vegans would have no trouble eating here, that's for sure).
We saw that the entrees were huge, so instead of ordering three different entrees, we mixed it up a bit. We ordered the "Royal Starter" appetizer with three classics of hummus, babaganoush, and tabouleh salad. Each came in its own container, and the serving size was very generous (especially the tabouleh). The hummus is much whiter than I'm used to seeing, but it's exceptionally smooth. The baba was also delicious, but the tabouleh was exceptional! Sometimes I run across tabouleh that's not minced finely enough, and the parsley feels overwhelming because you can feel the twigs and leaves, but this was not the case here. A deal for only $10.95 (and it can easily be eaten as a meal with the pocket breads).
We also got the falafel hot appetizer. You don't get the rice and such, but as an app, only costs $8.95 and you get 8 or so. These aren't little baby falafel, either. They're the size of a mini-cupcake. Comes with yummy yogurt sauce. Ours came well-fried, which gave the outside a nice crunch. We'd pop a falafel into our pocket bread and eat it like a slider--talk about yummy!
For our main entree, we ordered a chicken shish kafka ($17.95), which is basically an elongated meatball. We all agreed that this dish was a home run. We weren't exactly sure how it was flavored, but it tasted wonderful, and had a delicious complex flavor of many spices. As an entree, I think we got maybe 4 of 5 pieces (I lost count), but trust me--it's a huge entree. We ordered it with rice (seriously, who goes to a Mediterranean restaurant and orders fries?), and the rice basically covered the entire bottom layer of the plate; talk about a ton of food.
These dishes fed three of us, and we wound up taking three boxes of leftovers back to our hotel room!
Thank you so much, Detroit, for offering such a great little eatery. I'm giving this place 5 stars for our grand-slam dinner. [Speaking of which, congratulations on the ALDS division win for the Detroit Tigers. The team just won game 5 after we got back to our hotel.]
For us, this is yet another great example of Yelp helping us find a great local independent eatery while we're on the road. We found that Royal Kabob was one of the highest rated independent eateries we could get to easily, and we weren't disappointed.