Burgers Beget a Showcase
In 1981, Wahib Wahby opened a four-table hamburger stand in Alhambra. It was the usual come-down for an immigrant getting started in a new country. Back in Beirut, he’d run a continental restaurant.
Nine years later, Wahib’s Middle East moved to a larger restaurant two blocks from the old stand. Today it’s a big-time ethnic showcase restaurant complete with folk art-style Middle Eastern murals all over the huge dining room--and all over a big new room for private parties, too. It even serves some continental specialties alongside its very authentic Lebanese food.
In fact, Wahib’s has become a real Alhambra institution. It has one of the most multiethnic clienteles outside the fast-food world; this is, let’s say, among the rather few Lebanese restaurants where you see Chinese-Americans coming for takeout. (For that matter, where else can you order frog’s legs to go?)
It serves all the familiar Middle Eastern dishes, but it also has a rotating menu of homey Lebanese dishes such as kafta with potatoes: dense hockey pucks of ground lamb sharply flavored with allspice, served with boiled potatoes in a tomatoey sauce. (The Middle Eastern idea of a tomato sauce is pretty much the opposite of the Italian idea--it’s not a tomato puree but a broth lightly flavored with tomato juice, which is regarded as something like a tart fruit juice.)
Shortly after you sit down, you get a spread of appetizers: hummus (often garnished Beirut-fashion with olive oil and a few chickpeas), medium-hot peppers, fragrant pickled turnips (dyed pink with beet juice), outstanding herb-marinated green olives and a basket of fresh pita bread. You can get Lebanese wine to accompany everything, the Kefraya Gold Red being quite good.
The glory of the Lebanese table is its appetizers (mezzeh), and Wahib’s does a good job on them. Its tabbouleh is a light, lemony salad of minced parsley with just a sprinkle of mint and bulgur in it. The falafel are fried quite brown and ultra-crisp, the baba ghannouj (here called mtabbal) is light and smoky and the skinny little stuffed grape leaves have the authentic Lebanese flavor. So do the torpedo-shaped lamb-and-bulgur meatballs (kibbeh), though they could have a crisper crust.
Above all, Wahib’s makes excellent savory pies. The meat pies are like miniature lahmajouns, only made from leavened pita bread dough and formed into little squares with raised edges. The lamb topping is particularly delicious with a squeeze of lemon. The puffy, pyramidal spinach pies are also good, though not as tart with ground sumac as some Lebanese places make them. They need a little lemon juice.
Needless to say, there’s a massive appetizer combo plate for two, which you could easily make a meal of. It includes all the appetizers above plus green salad, tart yogurt cheese and a flavorful puree of raw lamb (kibbeh nayyeh), which the menu elsewhere refers to puckishly as Lebanese sushi.
The salad list includes the usual cucumbers in yogurt, here made with a good rich yogurt, and a delightful fattoush salad with Arab flatbread toasted very crisp for croutons. It has a classic Lebanese lemon and olive oil vinaigrette but, like the spinach pies, goes rather easy on the ground sumac.
The nightly specials include kibbeh with yogurt, which is kibbeh meatballs in a garlicky yogurt sauce, and a stew of lamb with okra, and mansaf, Wahib’s interpretation of the Bedouin lamb feast. This mansaf is roast lamb and fried cauliflower on a pilaf mixed with ground meat, all sprinkled with toasted almonds.
On Fridays you can get sayyadiyyeh, which is a filet version of the whole fish in tahineh sauce that is available every night. This is the same lemony, garlicky sauce that flavors hummus, of course.
I’ve been pleased with most dishes here--except, surprisingly, the beloved dish kibbeh bil-sainiyya, a sort of lamb meatloaf baked in the same sort of pan (and usually cut into the same shapes) as baklava. It looks as if the layers of lamb (much too thin) and the fried meat filling weren’t baked together but assembled at the last minute.
Though Wahib’s has its own bakery, its baklava is nowhere near as good as the food. No matter--dessert isn’t really part of a Lebanese meal. Just have a cup of Arab-style coffee. It’s the real thing.
BE THERE
Wahib’s Middle East Restaurant and Bakery, 910 E. Main St., Alhambra. (626) 281-1006 and (626) 576-1048. Open Sunday-Thursday, 9 a.m.-10 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 9 a.m.-midnight. Full bar. Parking lot and street parking. All major credit cards. Takeout. Dinner for two, food only, $8-$30. What to Get: meat pie, tabbouleh, felafel, fattoush, fish with tahineh sauce, mansaf, kafta with potatoes.