The Olive Tree Cafe and Bar, Sarasota - Once Is Enough

I was excited to read about The Olive Tree Cafe and Bar (http://olivetreecafeandbar.com/), a new Sarasota restaurant serving Middle Eastern cuisine, so I suggested to a friend that we have lunch there today. I'm sorry I suggested it.

We were given both a lunch menu and a dinner menu.

We each started with soup. My friend had lentil soup. It was good. I started with a cold cucumber and yoghurt soup. That was also good.

We were served pita bread with olive oil and zaatar, a mixture of spices like oregano and thyme. That was tasty as well. However, the meal went downhill from there.

My friend had the Felafel Platter from the lunch menu. The platter had felafel, green beans, and rice. The felafel was rock hard on the outside and difficult to eat. The taste was terrible. The green beans appeared to be out of a can, and the rice was blah. My friend has had felafel many times and knows how it should be cooked. When he mentioned to the waitress how bad it was, she explained that it was cooked the way it was supposed to be prepared.

I decided to order stuffed grape leaves, one of my favorite dishes, from the dinner menu. There were two types of stuffed grape leaves on the dinner menu - one type with ground beef and one type without. Both types had rice, onion, tomato, and dill. I ordered the type with meat. This was an appetizer plate with three small grape leaves and five olives for $6.25. When I ate the first stuffed grape leaf, I could not find any meat. I discussed the issue with a waiter. He showed me some microscopic dark specks, and said that was meat. If they had been much smaller, they would have been subatomic particles. I have had stuffed grape leaves with meat hundreds of times at home (made by my mother, my wife, and my sister), at the homes of relatives, and in many, many restaurants. I have never seen such small particles of meat. The waiter explained that they were prepared as normal. The taste of the rice mixture in the grape leaves was decent.

I had baklava bits for dessert. They were decent, but seemed expensive for what they were.

I had a glass of Italian red wine, and it was nice.

Several of the menu items I tried to order were unavailable. The waitress explained that the menu was in the process of being changed.

The man who appeared to be the owner seemed to spend much of his time talking on a cell phone. He might have been better served getting feedback from his customers in order to improve the quality of his offerings.

The waitress was very efficient and friendly, but she was very poorly informed about the ingredients in the various dishes.