Bringing Home the Baba

Tabule
2009 Yonge Street
647-724-4243
Take-out dinner for two with all taxes and tip: $60

A rainy night in mid-May, a lazy Toronto foodie, an empty stomach. Luckily, there is a solution to this conundrum, in the form of our city's many delivery and take-out food options. Ranging from the standard affordable, greasy, large-chain fare to on-demand haute cuisine services such as MenuPalace, where is the happy medium for price and quality? One establishment that gets raves, both for its in-house service and for to-your-door goodness is Yonge Street's Tabule, which serves up standard and hearty Middle Eastern fare with a surprising complexity of flavours.

In order to see how the food stands up to travel, we sampled a variety of their greatest hits, and picked them up to go on a Monday evening. The dinner for two included lentil soup ($4.50), a combination appetizer plate with tabule, humus and babaganuj ($9, spelling as per the restaurant's website), a fried eggplant appetizer ($5.95), the hallum salad with three pieces of seared cheese ($8.50), a kebab kefta dinner ($12.95), which came with rice and grilled veggies, and a slice of sweet baklava ($4.25).

The food was definitely a notch above standard takeout. Ordering to go from Tabule means fresh food fast, and offers more choice and healthy variety than the major delivery chains can afford. The lentil soup was hearty, but lacking the subtle spicing of a true Lebanese lentil stew that has been simmering all day. The baba was a creamy, smoky mess of garlicky goodness, and the humus, previously explored in TasteTO's Hommous Comparison, was nicely balanced between the strong garlic and the muted tahini. The tabule salad tasted almost too fresh, the parsley crunchy, having not absorbed the dressing and the spicing in full. The fried eggplant, a favourite dish when eaten in-house at Tabule, with its tart lemony oil and perfectly seared exterior, was lukewarm by the time we got to the container. After a few seconds of ultraviolet heat, however, the incredibly flavourful veggie melted in the mouth just like it was fresh off the pan. Most of the dips kept for a few days after delivery, and the tabule in fact got better over the same period of time, as the dressing settled on the greens.

The other parts of the meal, however, were best enjoyed at the time of delivery. The salty seared hallum cheese was balanced perfectly by a sweet, tangy pomegranate dressing, though the plain greens could have used a few other veggies to excite the presentation. The lone surviving piece of cheese was remarkably soggy by the next day, and the greens were not worth saving. And as for the meat - small, sausage shaped balls of seasoned ground beef and lamb grilled on a stick, knows as kebab kefta - it was well-received by the meat-eater in the party, but failed to excite this particular (picky) palate. The next day, the meat was dried out and the side veggies soggy. Still, the hearty fare we ordered more than filled us enough for a busy weeknight in uptown. And of course, no decent Middle Eastern dinner is complete without baklava, and Tabule's does not disappoint. The nutty flavours were perfectly balanced with the sweet cinnamon syrup, and the generous portion easily fed two already-full diners.

So, our take-home dinner from Tabule was a success, but not without misgivings. One note on the service - we ordered to pick-up from an online menu, which listed the appetizer combo plate as including falafel. The server on the phone was a very capable gentleman, and read back our order and confirmed everything perfectly, including said falafel. But after we unpacked our haul at home, we didn't have any falafel. Let it be known that this author really, really loves the Tabule falafel. A call to the resto was greeted curtly with the manager's assurance that we had been looking at the lunch version of the combo plate. We weren't, and we were none too pleased with the less-than-professional tone of address. An establishment as busy and as reknowned as Tabule could do to ensure that the quality of their customer service matches that of their flavourful food! Even if the baba is smoky good and the baklava is syrupy sweet, good service is still the key to any positive restaurant experience, be it take-home or eat-in.