About: http://data.yelp.com/Review/id/Vkw8PFmE5sxQmWaocw-p-w     Goto   Sponge   NotDistinct   Permalink

An Entity of Type : rev:Review, within Data Space : foodie-cloud.org, foodie-cloud.org associated with source document(s)

AttributesValues
type
dateCreated
itemReviewed
http://www.openvoc.eu/poi#funnyReviews
rev:rating
http://www.openvoc.eu/poi#usefulReviews
rev:text
  • First to review? I guess I'm not surprised. I would have never even thought to step one foot in the place if I didn't see this establishment featured on the Food Network television show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. You may have seen the show, it's hosted by Guy Fieri, who looks exactly like an over-bleached obese porcupine and who's on-screen talent seems to be limited to the ability to simultaneously stuff enormous bites of bad food into his mouth and mutter "awesome" or "totally-off-the-hook" or "too-legit" or some other outdated, cliched, catch phrase. If the show has a quota of each of the three classes of restaurants in the title, then Crystal definitely adds a +1 to the Dives category. It's a dump. The "restaurant" is nothing more than a tiny (~15ft wide) rectangular space most of which is occupied by a dive bar. There are a few tables in the back of the space, which is windowless save for two small windows at the entrance. For ambiance, the back of the bar has a couple of televisions (which were blaring college football when I was there), a pile of old electronics junk stuffed into a corner niche, and a few videogames. The interior is painted flat black - or possibly just coated in decades of cigarette smoke and other grime, which seems likely given the stale cigarettes and beer smell the permeates the place. For an added special touch during my visit (which occurred around Halloween), one of the videogames had a pumpkin sitting atop it, with a carving in the pumpkin that depicted the silhouette of a man mounting a woman from the rear. The fact that several of the tables had children didn't seem to deter the restaurant from displaying this extra special decorative treat. I almost forgot - one wall is also covered with portraits of the owner's family throughout the 1950s and 60s. It's a very strange sight indeed. So the TV episode showed that the owner, Crystal, is of Middle-Eastern descent (Lebanese, I think), and her specialty is, of course, Middle-Eastern food. So we started with the hummus. It was your basic, chickpeas-out-of-a-can hummus with lemon and tahini. It was served on a plate with very thin, right-out-of-the-bag, cold slices of pita. They didn't even take the time to toast the pita. What was even more puzzling is that the pita was cut - not in wedges, or in some other uniform shape - but seemingly in random sizes and shapes. WTF?!? It looked like a 5 year old was allowed to cut the pita. Some pieces were huge, some tiny to the point of being impractical to use to scoop a bite of hummus. Strange. My entree was a lamb kabob which was served along with grilled peppers and onions. The lamb was good, properly grilled, and succulent. The grilled peppers and onions weren't seasoned at all - not even a hint of salt. The dish was served with those randomly-shaped cut pieces of cold pita. Most of the pieces weren't even large enough to wrap around a single cube of lamb. All in all, the ambiance stunk, the food was mediocre, and I was afraid to try a draft beer due to the generally unclean appearance of the place (I ordered a bottle). I cannot imagine why anyone would prefer this place over other Middle-Eastern restaurants in Pittsburgh (Aladdins, for example). I will not be back.
http://www.openvoc.eu/poi#coolReviews
rev:reviewer
Faceted Search & Find service v1.16.115 as of Sep 26 2023


Alternative Linked Data Documents: ODE     Content Formats:   [cxml] [csv]     RDF   [text] [turtle] [ld+json] [rdf+json] [rdf+xml]     ODATA   [atom+xml] [odata+json]     Microdata   [microdata+json] [html]    About   
This material is Open Knowledge   W3C Semantic Web Technology [RDF Data] Valid XHTML + RDFa
OpenLink Virtuoso version 07.20.3238 as of Sep 26 2023, on Linux (x86_64-generic_glibc25-linux-gnu), Single-Server Edition (126 GB total memory, 93 GB memory in use)
Data on this page belongs to its respective rights holders.
Virtuoso Faceted Browser Copyright © 2009-2025 OpenLink Software