Emily's Lebanese Delicatessen - Minneapolis

I always feel good eating middle eastern food because I feel like I’m doing something good for my body.  A lot of the Triple-D restaurants serve tasty but, not necessarily heart healthy foods.  There's often a lot of red meat, salt and butter involved.

My experience with middle eastern is that it usually contains  a lot of fresh bean based dishes, smaller amounts of high quality meats, rice, tomato and salads.  Emily's was no different.

I ordered the Hummus appetizer and the #8 Lebanese Chicken & Rice with Lubin for lunch.  Lubin is yogurt.  It comes with Tabouli salad.  Tabouli salad is parsley, tomatoes, onions, cracked wheat and lemon juice.

The main dish of chicken and rice had thin slices of almond in it.  The yogurt was served on the side.  The combination of the starchy rice mixed with the citric yogurt was very good.

The more traditional way to prepare this dish might have been with pine-nuts instead of almonds.  That's what their menu says.  They had a sign up saying that they were substituting almonds in place of pine-nuts for some reason.  I don't know why.

The humus comes with flat bread and is practically a meal in itself.  I was making a concoction of humus and tabouli on the flat-bread and sliding some of that back while I waited for the main meal.  I had barely eaten any of it before I started filling up.  There was a lot of humus left over.  Humus is basically a garbanzo bean dip that you put on the tortilla-like flat-bread.

Like many Triple-D restaurants, Emily's is a neighborhood place.  Most of the people who sat down after me didn’t need to see the menu.  The whole restaurant is probably only 30 square feet inside.  They also had an outdoor seating area that isn't apparent if you walk up from the back parking lot.  The paneling was the pride of probably 1960.  There are faded framed posters promoting travel to Lebanon.  The Lebanese flag is thumb tacked to the wall.  There was a sign behind the cash register advertising the daily special: lamb’s tongues w/salad or soup $10.

I'm guessing that the neighborhood is comprised of Eastern European and Middle Eastern families.  There was a Catholic church a couple of blocks away that had a colorful dome roof that reminded me of architecture from that area.

I got turned on to middle eastern food when I used to visit Detroit a lot.  Some of the local folks there took me out to various middle eastern restaruants and taught me a bit about it.  I really developed a taste for it but, I don't get to Detroit too much anymore.  Emily's was a nice reminder.