A Culinary Autopsy
(My wife gave me the idea for that title. I'm not that clever.)
I should start by admitting I am a middle eastern restaurant's worst nightmare. I am half Lebanese, was raised Lebanese, and my maternal grandmother was acknowledged by the huge (Rochester!) Lebanese family as the queen of the kitchen. I ate much Middle Eastern food as a child.
I've wanted to try Sinbads since moving here because it is in such a trendy and interesting - and beautiful - part of Rochester. Let me say first off that the staff was very solicitous and polite. Prices are reasonable. Menu is extensive and interesting, perhaps even "creative."
I had high expectations.
They were utterly dashed.
We began with two appetizers, Malfouf and Tabbouleh. My grandmother made superb stuffed cabbage as well as stuffed grape leaves but always both stuffed with meat and rice, and seasoned simply with allspice, S&P, lemon. This concoction had only rice. And spices. So many spices. Overwhelmed the palate completely. Ungraciously, ignominiously, impolitely. The cabbage was undercooked and very crunchy. So was the rice. Neither had been cooked enough. I knew then and there if a place calling itself mediterranean (read: middle eastern) couldn't get stuffed cabbage right, it was going to be downhill from there. Stuffed cabbage also requires, customarily, tomato in the sauce. None, at least none I could sense given the heaped abuse of spices utterly foreign to stuffed cabbage, unless the orientation is Turkish, because their cuisine tends to the violent. Like this stuff tonight.
The tabbouleh was a slimy, gloppy mess of an overabundance of oil with the involved greens literally swimming in cupfuls of it and almost enough lemon juice to neutralize the ocean of oil. The burghul was almost missing in action it was so small and inconsequential to the overall dish. It is hard to wreck tabbouleh, but here we are. Shaka, when the walls fell...
We like to order several things, eat a little there and take home food for later. After the abortive unappetizing appetizers, soon arrived our kafta "wrap", shish kebab and a pizza (spelled "pitza" on the menu) containing shrimp and artichokes, among other things, something you can't really consider middle eastern unless it is a very contemporary and cosmopolitan middle eastern cuisine.
The kafta meat was so aggressively spiced as to be inedible. I have never had my taste buds so viciously assaulted as with the spicing of this poor piece of ground meat. The sauce was similarly over done. One bite and I was through with that experiment. My tongue lodged a complaint of assault and battery.
Even the meat of the shish kebab was overspiced and the addition of feta cheese was truly gilding the lily - oldfartspeak for "too much." While it was grilled (or roasted or charcoaled) enough, the seasoning overpowered the meat flavor. If the meat had been marinated before cooking it was overwhelmed. Maybe the marinade - if used - was overwhelming. I don't know, and after one piece of meat, I no longer cared. I had given up hope.
The "pitza" read as an interesting creation, so I tried it as an experiment. It failed. The cheese on top had not been exposed to heat long enough to
melt sufficiently. So some of the cheese was crunchy, some was melted, some was like it just got shook out of the Sorrento bag. The shrimp were appealingly large, but covered in some crusty goo that just tormented the flavor of the shrimp until it simply gave up the ghost. I ate the shrimp & left the undercooked spinach & soggy undercrust, but I picked some roasted red peppers from the miasma of stuff and ate them separately.
There's nothing like good middle eastern food and this was nothing like good middle eastern food. It was awful and thus I felt like I was performing an autopsy on food unfairly subjected to over-seasoning, under-cooking and less then enough attention to preparation and ... cooking. I felt, too, that my taste buds had been literally assaulted and brutalized with so many spices of incompatible contention in too many combinations on food that needed
***SUBTLETY***
when there was absolutely none. This was the most unflatteringly aggressive and obnoxious M.E. cuisine I have ever had in 61 years. I felt dismally sorry for all the people eating there who probably thought "this is such great mediterranean food" but knew no better.
I am convinced that the people giving this food anything over two stars are either unfamiliar with good middle eastern food and its subtleties or they are perhaps suffering from some sort of cognitive disorder.
If you want excellent Lebanese food prepared simply by a genuine Lebanese grandmother ("sittu") who still works there every day, go to Cedar on Monroe Avenue. Avoid Sinbad - a conjunction of two aptly descriptive words for this ugly meal - at all costs.
Cause of palate death: excess spicing in violation of the Geneva convention & norms of international law, & good taste. read more