I went to the nearby hotel, Felix Arabia, for lunch today. Got there at noon, which is when they usually start serving lunch. The waiter said that they were not serving yet. No problem, I got some water and hung out. Well, 40 minutes later I asked the manager when lunch would be served. He explained to me that it would be another 20 minutes since this was friday. Grrr, no one could have told me this? I felt like pointing out that he wasn’t at the mosque, the waiters weren’t at the mosque, so why couldn’t they serve now? I didn’t do it, but the thoughts were running around in my head. Anyway, they eventually took my order. Half an hour later, they brought the wrong dish to me. I didn’t say anything since I was happy to have anything at all. It was their “lemon chicken”, a soupy mix of chicken and veggies with some rice. The waiter then explained that there wasn’t any silverware. Now there are some things that I will eat with my hands, but this wasn’t one of them, it was just too messy. They certainly had silverware the other night (more on that later) so I asked him why there wasn’t any now. He explained that there wasn’t any clean silverware, but that my hands looked clean… “Do you have water? Do you have soap? Then you can have CLEAN SILVERWARE YOU LAZY SON OF A BITCH” was what was going through my head. I live just a minute or two from the place so I went back and got a fork, when I returned, they had put out silverware for me…
The last time I went there, I ordered “lamp (sic) Yemen style.” It was pretty good except that the lamb was the worst cuts I’ve ever had. It was still on the bone and was all gristle. On top of that, there were a whole bunch of tiny shards of bone in it as well essentially making it inedible. The first time I went was really good, that and the fact that they are 2 or three minutes from my house makes me want to keep trying them. One more screw up and I’m done with them…
Isaac