From The New Orleans Menu Daily By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published December 18, 2007 Byblos 3$ Old Metairie: 1501 Metairie Rd. 834-9773. Uptown: 3218 Magazine, 894-1233. Lunch and dinner continuously, seven days. AE DC DS MC V Lebanese. When Byblos opened in Metairie in 1994, a few Lebanese restaurants had come and gone around New Orleans. Some were even good. But Byblos was in a different league. The three menu who opened it--Gabriel Saliba, Tarek Tay, and Hicham Khodr--were Lebanese natives. Gabby Saliba had even run restaurants in Beirut. They held back nothing from that famously delicious cuisine, and bought better ingredients for creating it than we'd ever seen around town. Maybe Lebanese food would have become popular here even without Byblos. But I doubt it. They set a standard that other Lebanese restaurants had to match. (And, in many cases, they did.) And it made the style much more appealing to those for whom it was still an exotic cuisine. Which, let's note, was hardly everybody. New Orleans has a larger and older Lebanese population than most people realize, going back several generations. I know more than a few people here who eat gumbo and kibbe in the same meal. The original Byblos was in a former fast-food restaurant in the parking lot of the Metairie Shopping Center. Two renovations later, you'd never know that origin. The place looks and feels as good as any casual restaurant in town. The second location is bigger, slicker, and busier, in a historic (circa 1850) building on Magazine Street. A mix of modern and period elements create a handsome, airy, comfortable dining room with a big bar and an open kitchen. The groceries they use remain of great quality. The lamb chops is well-trimmed, the chicken is all breast meat, and the rice is basmati. The fish and vegetables are fresh. The food is beautiful in taste and presentation, and completely avoids the heaviness and oiliness you find in bad versions of Lebanese food. A great way to eat here is to go in a party of four to six and order all the appetizers on the menu. Unlike the appetizer sections of Western restaurants, with their predominance of seafood and very rich sauces, Middle Eastern appetizers range over the entire spectrum of eating, from vegetables and beans to seafoods to meats, from grilled items to dips to savory pastries. Some of the best of these include the kibbe (a little football of ground beef with seasonings, herbs, cracked wheat, and pine nut, then fried), the cloud-light cheese pie and spinach pie, and the various dips made with chickpeas, eggplant, garlic, and olive oil. The soup-and-salad department is important, too. On a cold day (or a day when you have a cold), few dishes are more pleasant than Byblos's lentil and spinach soup, a heartwarming potage. The tabbouleh salad--made of parsley, tomatoes, onions, cracked wheat, and lemon juice--is palate-perking and almost absurdly heathy to eat (it's loaded with Vitamin C, from the parsley). The starring foodstuff on the entree list is lamb. Using New Zealand lamb--not the best, but certainly not bad--Byblos puts out an ample plate of marinated, grilled lamb chops that bid fair to be to called the best in the city. Certainly for their simplicity: no sauce, just a spectacular seasoning and deft grilling. The most popular platter is chicken shawarma, a Lebanese staple. It's prepared in a non-classic way, by just grilling the thin strips of chicken with the seasonings. This doesn't dilute the goodness--although the chicken shawarma at the little deli in the Byblos Market on Veterans (a side operation of the restaurants) is actually better, I think, because it is prepared in the traditional way, piled on a vertical rotisserie. In second place behind the shawarma are the various kebabs: chicken, lamb, shrimp, beef, and kafta. That last one is a sausage-shaped meatball on a spit, flavored with parsley and herbs, grilled to crusty. You can get a combo platter of various kebabs, too. All of this comes with very good hummus and a rice pilaf of basmati rice and short segments of angel-hair pasta. (This is the ancient dish that gave birth to Rice-A-Roni.) They make good desserts. The house specialty is ashta, a phyllo pastry stuffed with a light cream filling and served with a very sweet, honeyed sauce. Service is very good, and at this new location the wine list seems to have been greatly expanded, with a uniform emphasis on less-expensive wines from places like Chile, Australia, and Spain. The Magazine Street restaurant, because of its commodious dining room, has occasional entertainment, including belly dancing on Thursday. I avoid it, because it reminds me rather too much of my own oversize belly, made the shape it is to some extent by the many very filling meals I've had at Byblos over the years. Nobody leaves this place hungry. 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.