Anne Fishbein

The two desserts: Chocolate Decadence; Basbusa (somolina cake) with tahini ice cream

Check out Anne Fishbein's photo gallery of Assaf Granit and Uri Navon's Israeli dinner.

On their first trip to Los Angeles, Israeli chefs Assaf Granit and Uri Navon wasted no time in getting to know some of this town's culinary habits. They shopped at the Santa Monica Farmers Market, partnered with Suzanne Tracht for a dinner tribute to Israeli Independence at Jar, and cooked at Nobu Malibu with Gregorio Stephenson. When they stepped out of their chef's whites, they dined at Animal and Son of a Gun. A few days later they made a round of food truck visits -- after they purchased gifts for their wives. It was emblematic of what is commonly assocated with food in L.A.: seasonal ingredients, mobility, as well as bridging gaps between high and low, old and new.

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Susan Ji-Young Park

Mini Kabob

Although Mini Kabob in Glendale looks like a modest house repurposed into a commercial restaurant, describing it as like dining in someone's living room would be far too extravagant. You're basically eating at Ovakim and Alvard Martirosyan's modestly decorated kitchen counter.

Mini Kabob meets all the criteria of a great hole in the wall to the millimeter: 1) It's mom-and-pop operated, by first generation immigrants no less. 2) It's located in a tiny building on a narrow side street off Central Blvd. in Glendale, just south of developer Rick Caruso's behemoth Americana. 3) There are just three tables and eight chairs, all mismatched. 4) They serve high quality food in large portions at affordable prices. And 5) They're expert specialists.

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G. Snyder

mezze at Al Amir

Sandwiched between a small sushi bar and a Chinese restaurant in Valley Village is Al Amir, a Lebanese café that opened early this year. This part of the San Fernando Valley has always had a pretty good community of Middle Eastern restaurants, with bustling big-city places like Cedar House and Alcazar dominating much of the scene. There were also the fragrant skewers of shish tawook served with lighter-than-air garlic sauce at Hayat's Kitchen, and the earthy, cumin-laced kafta kabobs popular at nearby Skaf's.

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Navid Negahban as Abu Nazir in Homeland

Ronen Akerman/SHOWTIME

If you read our interview earlier in the week, you already know several things about Navid Negahban including 1) He loves his role as Abu Nazir, the scary Al Queda kingpin on the Showtime thriller, Homeland, 2) He figured out a way to enjoy himself when he was detained for roughly five hours by Israeli customs officials and 3) He learned to cook wonderful and delicious dishes from his great-grandmother, Bibi. It was the latter that got us thinking, "Why not ask for a recipe?" In response, Nagahban kindly sent us a perfect Homeland premiere party dish -- a Persian eggplant spread called kashk o bademjoon. For the recipe, turn the page.

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Farid Zadi

Couscous prep

Oktoberfest doesn't just mean sausage and sauerkraut -- at least not when Farid Zadi busts out his tagine this weekend. On Sept. 22 and 23, the French-Algerian chef and owner of the recently opened Spanish Fly Gastropub in Koreatown brings back his Couscousfest for a third year. Larger in scope than the previous iterations, Zadi will host two days of North African street food, craft beer, "Algerian agua frescas," and North African tagine cooking demos.

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Nick Wilson

Tandoori Chicken at Zam Zam

Have you ever been to Zam Zam Market, a Pakistani restaurant down the street from King Fahad Mosque in Culver City? If not, there was probably good reason: The take-out shop was only open from Thursday to Sunday at irregular hours, and often only cooked a limited supply of dishes that ran out quickly. But since many considered the aromatic biryani, chicken tandoori, and seekh kabobs worthy of any inconvenience (ourselves included), diehards fans would often stake out their lamb korma like it was an iPhone 5.

It seems those days are over, as Zam Zam Market recently expanded its hours to seven days a week, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. and added a revamped menu board that should make it easier for non-regular to navigate the selections. The food has long been extremely popular with the local Muslim community, and on most Friday afternoons the shop bustles with pick-up orders.

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Anne Fishbein

Mezze's marinated local sardine, zucchini, vegetable jus

This week, Mezze is the subject of my review. While I hope you'll take the time to read the full review, I offer this Mezze-review-for-dummies blog post.

Food: Middle Eastern-influenced New American, with a focus on small plates, but also a few fantastic entrees and a selection of flatbreads. From the review: "The flavors of Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Morocco guide his efforts, but, like most great New American cooking, there's a playfulness and fluidity here that keeps the food from being staunchly defined as traditional in any way. In other words, you won't find hummus on the menu. ... Couscous is topped with sea urchin -- a combination that shouldn't work, but does, the sexed-up saline funk of the urchin playing beautifully with the lemon and mint in the couscous."

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G. Snyder

Falafel Laffa at Joe's Falafel

When fresh from the oven, the variety of Israeli flatbread known as laffa is delicious enough to inspire fever dreams: a stretchable, oval-shaped length of unleavened bread -- not dissimilar to a good Indian naan -- pulled just thick enough to form a kind of textural duality between its soft chewy interior and its char-flecked, crackery crust. You can buy stacks of fresh laffa in the markets of Tel Aviv or, more conveniently, in the crowded bakeries of Pico Bouelvard's Kosher Corridor, though when a fresh batch arrives you should expect to do battle with a gaggle of no-nonsense tichel-wrapped mothers either way. As wonderful as laffa is when dragged through a dish of hummus or spread heavily with baba ghanoush, its ideal state might be when wrapped into handy sandwich form, stuffed with things like crispy falafel balls or chicken shawarma.

It is at this point that we reach Joe's Falafel, an immaculately polished strip-mall restaurant in Universal City that opened about six months ago, close enough to the nearby theme park that it could practically be considered a bonus attraction. If you were to compare Joe's to, say, King Kong 3-D or Transformers: The Ride, the moment that would elicit the most ooohs and aaahs probably would be when owner Joe Mattar opens the lid of his clay-lined taboon oven, which resembles one of those huge laundromat washing machines, pats out a circle of dough and slaps it onto the hot stone. He artfully flips, twists and turns the made-to-order laffa with two long metal canes -- imagine if sculptor Dale Chihuly had chosen yeast and flour as his medium instead of molten glass -- then pulls out the finished product and lays it down on the counter still steaming and sizzling, scenting the entire room with the smell of fresh bread.

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Elina Shatkin

Duck Shawarma at Momed

Leading up to this year's Best of L.A. issue (due out Oct. 4), we'll be counting down, in no particular order, 100 of our favorite dishes.

95: Duck Shawarma at Momed.

Beverly Hills might not be the first place that comes to mind when the topic of Mediterranean food comes up. But for just over two years Alex Sarkissian's Momed, a bright and spacious café popular with locals, has specialized in things like spicy soujuk sausage, airy whipped hummus and baba ganoush, and fresh sheets of bread painted with vibrant za'atar and melted akkawi cheese. You could drop in for a light breakfast of sheep's milk yogurt topped with a handful of roasted walnuts and a drizzle of honey, or arrive in the later in the evening for a plate of grilled lamb ribs slicked with chile and apricot pureé. For a place that touts itself as "Modern Eastern Mediterranean," Momed's laissez-faire attitude is more in tune with those old-world neighborhood cafés than the highly-polished modern boutiques surrounding it.

But there is one item in particular that has reached cultic levels of fanaticism among Beverly Hills office workers -- and really, anyone brave enough to hunt down parking midday -- and that is Momed's duck shawarma wrap. (It's also prepared at dinnertime, when it becomes a combo plate served with pickled veggies and crunchy momo potato chips.)

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Mezza MG

The Shawarma Initiative

Remember that scene in E.T. with the Reese's Pieces? It reportedly boosted sales of the candy so high in 1982 that Hershey Corp. was forced to keep a factory open minting the candies 24/7. The moral of the story? Feature a food in a popular movie and people with not so subliminally find themselves craving it.

This weekend another record-breaking blockbuster, The Avengers, is producing a similar effect on hungry moviegoers. If you haven't seen it, here is the "shawarma scene," in which a battered Iron Man tells Captain America about his craving for a shawarma wrap from the place down the street. (Of course, the odds of a guy who was cryogenically frozen during the 1940s knowing what shawarma is might be a long shot.) Later, after the end credits, the entire superhero crew is shown sitting around a table contentedly wolfing down shawarma. Even the Hulk looks like he enjoyed it.

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