The City of Brotherly Love

Welcome all.. the city of Brotherly Love: Philadelphia! The city that I hailed from, though I moved at age five to the Boston area. I love this city and am really excited to be here visiting some friends and my cousin. My favorite cousin, as he would tell you! I arrived around 5 pm, just in time for dinner. :o)

We headed directly into Philly,into the Society Hill part of the city. Lots of really great restaurants are here. We went to Zahav, a wonderful Israeli/middle-eastern restaurant offering a tapas-style dinner with small plates meant for sharing. Their tasting menu,as they call it, was wonderful. The place was really gorgeous.

When you walk in there's some very middle-eastern looking decorations on the wall, opening to a large room with several stained-glass squares made by the owner's father. There's a large picture of the top of a crowd from Israel. The lights are very middle-eastern in appearance, and then there are several areas with draped tapestry over the seating area. They look almost like a chuppah, which is the tapestry/cloth that is draped over an area used for a wedding ceremony. The cloth was beautiful and made the area appear very intimate.

It starts with an incredible bread, almost pita-like but larger and clearly just made from a brick-style oven, with 'salad items' including a large bowl of hummus. It's not like the traditional hummus and was quite creamy with some kind of black beans in it and lots of tasty olive oil. 8 tiny bowls came with it, with things like tabbouli, eggplant (almost like baba ganoush but prepared a little differently), a tomato and cucumber mixture, beets in a seasoning (and I HATE beets, but rather liked this), carrots, and a couple of others.

Next we selected 6 small plates and the food seemed to just keep coming! We got this amazing watermelon 'salad' with small pieces of olive, feta cheese and pistachios. Then came fried cauliflower, roasted zucchini with cheese and hazelnuts, kibbe naya, which is a raw lamb seasoned mixture over small lettuce leaves with some nuts (almost like the lettuce wraps you can get at some asian restaurants.) My friend's hubby recommended a 'chef's choice' for our remaining two items, and we got a chicken liver appetizer which was surprisingly good, and I forget what else! It was all incredible.

For our 'entree' we got three dishes: duck kebabs with with ground pistachio and saffron, veal with black-eyed peas, kale and saffron and moroccan chicken with almond bulgar, matbucha and a fried egg. The moroccan chicken was the nicest presentation, with the chicken,a tomato salad and a lovely small fried egg. Dessert was incredible with a pavlova surrounded by basted strawberries, a katafi with lebanese ice cream, valharona chocolate and mangoes (it's a shredded phyllo dough dessert, not dissimilar to the consistency of baklavah), and crispy phyllo cigars with lemon sherbert. We had asked about the rugelah and the waitress brought them over too, with the chef's pleasure. Yum... everything was simply amazing. The portions were great as well.. we were all full, but not bursting given the volume of dishes we had the opportunity to try. They were perfectly portioned to have a taste of everything without being overwhelmed. I couldn't recommend this place more highly!

www.zahavrestaurant.com/

If I haven't mentioned it, my friends are total foodies so they have some amazing restaurants planned. We'll have a great time eating our way through the best Philly has to offer! As we were walking to the car, we noticed some of the July 4th festivities going on and decided to check it out. There was a live band playing an Earth, Wind and Fire song that was quite good, and we stood for a bit enjoying it. WaWa Welcome America at Penn's Landing is going on for the next week or so. We watched the crowd for a bit including some kids playing in a little fountain area with a sign prominently displayed 'no wading'. It was an interesting cross-section of the local population for sure!!!

 We made our way back to their house and I got the 'grand tour.' Really lovely place and made me miss the northeast a bit! Their backyard looks out to a lush green area filled with large, mature trees. Ahhh.. This morning we woke up early and went to Einstein's to meet up with some of their friends. Have an enjoyable breakfast and coffee to start our day. today we are going on a mural arts tour which I'm really excited about! I'll write later today/tomorrow to fill you in on our adventures!!!