From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published May 8, 2007 Babylon Cafe 2$ Riverbend: 7724 Maple 314-0010. Lunch and dinner continuously, seven days. AE DC DS MC V Middle Eastern. A restaurant that shares its building with a laundromat (with windows through which, of you were dining and doing your wash at the same time, you could check on the progress of the drying from your table), Babylon Cafe is a pleasant, spacious restaurant for the inexpensive eating of the classic Lebanese menu. But it has a few specialties that pop it out from the average Middle Eastern restaurant. The best of those is all by itself good enough reason to go to the place. They bake an exceptionally good bread at Babylon, and serve it hot out of the oven. It's like a fat pita bread. Or an unsauced, uncheesed pizza that's not completely rolled out. They call it "Najah bread" (the name of the owner), and you can't stop eating the stuff. Naturally enough, you use the bread as a carrier for hummus and baba ghanoosh and the rest of the Lebanese dip-like cold dishes. They also make sandwiches with it, filling the center with chicken, beef, lamb, vegetables, or that sausage-shaped meatball-like thing they call kafta. It winds up being shaped something like a poor boy, but the taste and texture are unique. It becomes a problem: you can stuff yourself with the bread, and not have room for the lamb chops or the chicken shawarma. The menu covers all the favorite dishes of that cuisine, and executes them all very well at prices below even those standard for restaurants of this kind. They don't have a liquor license here, and so they allow you to bring in your own wine without paying a corkage fee. Service tends toward the perfunctory side; they seem to have the idea that every customer is in a hurry. This was a restaurant in the 2007 Top Sixty Ethnic Restaurant Countdown. To view the entire list, click here. Click here for an index of all restaurant reviews. © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com.