Pita Palace is a kosher Middle Eastern restaurant located in the Briar Vista shopping center not far from Emory, across the street from Whole Foods Briarcliff. It's a hole in the wall. I'm not going to go as far as calling it a "shack," but it almost feels like one. This is more of a quick lunch or take-out place than it is a restaurant to sit down and enjoy a meal. I like it because it's akin to Israeli street food. The kitchen prepares many of its ingredients daily, including their own taboon bread.
The restaurant is on the La Vista side of the shopping center, facing Whole Foods. It's in a small corner spot. They've crammed a lot of tables into the limited space and there's some covered seating outside. During peak periods, parking can get tight so you may have to park around the corner and walk over.
Pita Palace has chicken shawarmas (freshly shaved off the spit), falafel (made of ground chickpeas), schnitzel (breaded chicken), pargiot (dark meat cornish hen), white meat grilled chicken, seasoned beef kabobs, hamburgers, and veggie pitas. You can order the falafel and meats in various forms, e.g. inside a pita pocket or wrapped in laffa (taboon bread). The laffa wraps are quite big, significantly bigger than the pita pockets. They are comparable in size to a Mission-style burrito (such as Moe's or Chipotle). It's a lot of meat/food.
Pitas run about $7-10 each, laffas run about $8-13 each. If you don't want a pita or laffa, you can have the meat served on a baguette, in a salad, on as an entree (double meat, for roughly $15) with salad bar items.
I recommend ordering the laffa because taboon bread can be hard to find in Atlanta, especially freshly-made taboon bread. Taboon is made out of chickpea flour and is traditionally used as a flatbread wrap in Jewish cuisine. It's soft and slightly spongy.
There's a self-serve salad bar that is used by both customers and staff. The salad bar has hummus (chickpea spread), baba ghanoush (eggplant spread), spicy sauces (jalapeno, habanero), Israeli salad (tomatoes and cucumbers), pickles, red cabbage, coleslaw, pita chips, fried eggplant, sauerkraut, and other items. The salad bar is included with most orders.
If you order a sandwich/wrap, the staff will use ingredients from the salad bar, Subway-style, to customize your order. I like to load my laffa wraps with lots of stuff: hummus, baba ghanoush, Israeli salad, red cabbage, pickles, and slaw. They also have sauces in squeeze bottles, such as tzatziki yogurt sauce. It is good stuff. Don't put too many sauces/spreads inside or your meal will get messy towards the end.
The meats I suggest ordering are the shawarma, pargiot, and beef kabobs. You can see the chicken shawarma rotating on a spit behind the counter. I think this is their most popular meat and it's not uncommon to see it completely gone by the end of the day. The shawarma and the pargiot, both marinated chicken, taste somewhat similar. However, the shawarma chicken meat is sliced thin while the pargiot chicken meat is chopped into small chunks. Either way, you can't go wrong. The beef kabobs are delicious. The beef patties are nicely seasoned with onions and spices and are flavorful and satisfying. I think the meat portions are generous.
Overall, I have found the ingredients to be sufficiently fresh and the wraps to be tasty and filling.
Service is good.
Bottled water and soft drinks are available in a fridge. If you want tap water, you have to get it yourself from a bathroom-looking sink that is oddly placed in the short hallway leading to the lone restroom. Funny enough, it's not the first time I've seen something like that. read more