We had dinner at Zayna Mediterranean last August 2013, while we were visiting Tucson. Zayna was close to our hotel and had gotten pretty good reviews on Yelp. Overall, the adults liked the food but the children were not very happy.
We got there pretty late, after 8 PM, and the place was buzzing. The two waitresses could not really serve the full-restaurant adequately. That meant that our drinks were rarely refilled, and they weren’t available to correct mistakes. They were friendly, just overwhelmed.
The menu is standard Arab/Syrian food. I had the lamb kifta ($12.5) and the skewers were quite tasty. My oldest daughter liked the green beans and we all thought the buttered rice was very good.
My daughter, on the other hand, did not like the mujadara ($8) she ordered. Granted, it was probably my fault for not explaining to her what a pilaf was – she thought it’d be a lentil and rice soup! We ordered it without the grilled onions, so it did lack flavor and it was very dry. For me, mixing in the yogurt sauce helped greatly, though it still was a pretty boring dish.
My husband had some sort of pita sandwich which he enjoyed, we all liked the fried potatoes it came with.
The dressed salads, however, were so sour that they were basically inedible to us.
The restaurant itself is pretty cute, the colored walls are decorated with huge photos of Damascus. Two or three of them looked exactly like the ones I took when I visited over twenty years ago.
Zayna Mediterranean
4122 E Speedway Blvd
Tucson, AZ
(520) 881-4348
zaynamediterranean.com
Mon-Sun 11 am – 9 pm
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