LA Weekly
Jan 7 2010

Far From the Lebanese Crowd
Mantee, via Beirut, on Ventura Boulevard
By Jonathan Gold
Published on January 07, 2010 at 1:15pm
Anne Fishbein

Pretty spectacular: mantee, at ManteeWhatever sort of Lebanese
restaurant you may be thinking of at the moment, Mantee is the other
kind, a tiny, stuffy café near the eastern end of Ventura Boulevard,
not too far from the studios but a million miles from the brash good
cheer of places like Carnival and Skaf’s. Mantee isn’t where you come
for a falafel plate or roasted chicken; it’s where you go to watch a
stunningly beautiful waitress set a plate of sausage aflame.

The restaurant has a claustrophobic, overdecorated look you may
associate with tearooms, a dining room spackled with framed
orange-crate labels and with windows trimmed with lace; it is
furnished with murderous sub-decorator chairs, a plague of houseplants
and a wash of appalling music. The desserts are outsourced from a
pastry chef who never met a passion-fruit mousse she didn’t like. The
first time I walked into the restaurant, I would have bolted if the
friends I was meeting weren’t already seated on the patio. Mantee
really does feel like a restaurant your great-aunt’s bridge partner
might suggest after her second 7 and 7, and the list of house
specialties, which include filet mignon with cherries, filet mignon
with brown sauce, and canapés of sliced sujuk topped with fried quail
eggs, reads like a catering menu.

But that tan, the thick, salted yogurt drink that is standard at
Lebanese joints ‘ here it’s rich, barely soured, almost buttery, like
fresh mozzarella sipped through a straw. The hummus is complexly
nutty, expressing the round, toasty taste of chickpeas instead of
concealing it with sesame paste, and it’s even better sprinkled with
Lebanese pine nuts fried in olive oil. In the fattouch, the fried
shards of pita bread are tossed with fresh mint and slightly
astringent leaves of purslane instead of the usual assortment of
lettuces, and the simple dressing of oil and lemon juice quivers with
the tartness of sumac. The house-made lebne has a creamy depth of
flavor you may never have experienced in yogurt.

Mantee is run by Jonathan Darakjian, whose family owns one of the
best-known Armenian restaurants in Beirut, and his menu, down to the
lamb chops and the basturma canapés, turns out to be pretty close to
that of the Lebanese original. (That odd sautéed fillet is cousin to
kafta karaz, a very good ground-meat kebab with a cherry-studded
sweet-sour sauce, which is a specialty of both Mantee and the Beirut
restaurant Al Mayass.) So while the pomegranate-sweetened
walnut-pepper dip muhammara may be stodgy and the stuffed grape leaves
are exactly like every other stuffed grape leaf you’ve tasted, the
raw, pounded-beef kibbe nayeh has a real, sinewy presence; and a dish
of baked feta, which you would expect to be on the dull side, is
transformed into something like a pungent Levantine version of a
Mexican queso fundido. The spicy sujuk sausage sizzles to a tawny,
caramelized shine above its flaming, waitress-tended crock. The
su-bourek, a flaky pastry of cheese-stuffed filo, crackles and oozes
when you stab it with your fork, which is just what you expect a good
bourek to do. And as you’d reasonably expect, Mantee’s namesake dish
is pretty spectacular: a white-hot gratin plate bubbling with
garlic-infused yogurt and a handful of crunchy little beef dumplings.
If you squint, the dumplings look a bit like hats plucked from a
platoon of Napoleon dolls.

As at most Lebanese restaurants, the best dishes tend to be the mezze:
the salads and dips and bits of sausage that form most of the menu.
The kebabs, though professionally prepared, come as an afterthought.

So is the cooking here better than what you find at local places, like
Alcazar and Marouch? Not necessarily, but the flavors have an edge
quite unlike anything else in town. The comparison is inexact, but you
may be reminded of the sensation, after years of eating polished
Hunanese dishes in the San Gabriel Valley, of running into the rough,
sturdy cooking of a chef freshly arrived from Hunan.

MANTEE: 10962 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. (818) 761-6565,
ManteeCafe.com. Open Sun., Tues.-Thurs., 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m.; Fri.-Sat.,
11 a.m.-10 p.m. MC, V. No alcohol. Street parking. Mezze $4.95-$7.95;
entrées $12.95-$17.95. Recommended dishes: Hummus with pine nuts,
lebneh, mantee `traditional,” sujuk flambé.

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