Marga's Foodblog

For months we've seen the "Kolbeh Restaurant" sign at the old Casa María location. Slowly, we've seen some furniture appear inside, some paiting, then some decorations and finally the outside being painted. However, the progress was so slow that we wondered if it'd ever open.

It finally did, apparently a few weeks ago, but with little fanfare. I was puzzled that sometimes when I walked by it seemed opened, and others most definitely closed. Part of the problem, apparently, is that they also do catering, so if they have a catering event they have to close down to attend to it. This should change when they have more staff.

In any case, the restaurant is open and it usually offers lunch and dinner. After a failed attempt at doing a lunch buffet, they are now serving an extremely brief menu consisting of three types of kababs (ground beef, $5, chicken, $6 and fish $7), a sandwhich made with kabab meat ($6), three simple salads (garden, romaine and tomato-cucumber-onion, $2-3) and a soup of the day ($3). They also daily specials, also in the $5-6 range. Today, for example, it was a salmon dish and a cornish hen.

The prices seem low but they come without sides, it'll cost you $1 extra for rice, another $1 for veggies, while hummus, babaghanoush and yogurt sauce are $2 each. You may want to get one of the sauces, while the beef and chicken kababs were nicely, if lightly, spiced, they were both too dry. The buttered mixed white-and-saffron rice, however, was quite nice.

The restaurant itself, both in concept and execution, needs work. Or at least, it needs work to become the type of restaurant I'm likely to patronize. For one, it needs more items in the menu. Unless you have a terrible hankering for kebabs and have taking a particular liking to the ones here, there isn't much of a reason to bring you to Kolbeh. You can get kebabs and kebab-like thingies at Luke's Grill a block away, and your companions can have the option of ordering something else. There also need to be some vegetarian options in the menu, some of the daily special are vegetarian but you'd have to call ahead and find out what's on the plate that day if you are averse to meat. Finally, the restaurant has to find what it really wants to be.

The owners seem to be working on that. They used to have a Persian restaurant of the same name in Danville - but for some reason they thought that formula wouldn't work in San Leandro. At first they thought about starting a taqueria, but with three Mexican restaurants within a couple of blocks they realized that idea wasn't going to fry. So they decided on a "Mediterranean" theme, which would allow them to serve English-named Persian dishes in addition to what they perceive are more user-friendly dishes from countries such as Italy and France. Their original concept was to have a daily buffet (I think for $10) but that quickly frizzled as they found there was practically no demand for that. Now they are thinking of keeping the buffet only on weekends. I'll definitely give it a try then.

For now, Heston, the man in charge, seemed to be very amenable to feedback, and perhaps it'd be possible to convince him to turn this place into a Mediterranean bistro - aka a place such as La Med or Pomegranate in Berkeley, or even like the cheaper but popular Truly Mediterranean. So stop by and tell him what you think!