Kabob-Ster

Kabob-ster is a quick service Middle Eastern/Mediterranean restaurant in East Brainerd, Tennessee, near Hamilton Place Mall.

Sometimes Sundays can be a little bit of a wash for me as far as cooking goes. Hey, it’s the weekend. All I want to do is park myself on the couch and read cookbooks and have food delivered to my house. Alas, my delivery options are pizza (good, but I don’t want pizza all the time) or Dinner Delivered, and I can’t hang with those delivery charges.

Anyway, last Sunday I didn’t plan lunch. I knew what we were having for dinner (this soup from The Cookie Rookie but lunch hadn’t even crossed my mind. We wanted to head to McKay’s to look at books, so since we were going to be on that side of town we decided to check out Kabob-Ster. Kabob-Ster has been on my list for a while, but their location is a little bit prohibitive because we despise Gunbarrel traffic.

Sunday afternoon turned out to be a pretty good time to head out there. It was about 1:30 by the time we got there, which meant that any threat of a “church crowd” had passed. There were several tables occupied but no one in line to order food, so we headed up to place our order. I think they may have been playing catch-up from a little bit of a lunch rush because it did take a bit for our food to come out, but not an annoyingly long time. They also have call-ahead ordering and a drive-thru if you aren’t feeling a wait.

I am a bit of a falafel fanatic, so I decided to go for the falafel plate, with five pieces of falafel and tahini dipping sauce, hummus and pita wedges, and tabbouleh salad. I thought that the falafel was delicious – very crunchy, well-seasoned, and flavorful, and the sauce was a nice cool, creamy foil to the crispy, hot falafel. The hummus was smooth and creamy as well…so much more creamy than I can ever coax my hummus into being. I must work on this. The tabbouleh was good, with a great balance between the vegetable and herbal elements and the bulgur – too often tabbouleh is too much bulgur and not enough of the other stuff. My only complaint was that the pita was a little bit dry, but it got the job (of shoveling hummus into my face) done.

Philip decided to go for the beef shawarma wrap, and honestly, even though my falafel was delicious, I was feeling a little bit jelly of that wrap. It had thinly shaved beef cooked shawarma style with tahini sauce, onions, tomatoes, and pickles. The wrap was grilled and a little bit crispy, and everything was extremely flavorful.

We decided to get some baklava to take home – traditional baklava with walnuts, pistachio baklava, and cashew baklava. I didn’t remember to take pictures of them, but they were relatively inexpensive – about $1.50 apiece. They were all tasty but the traditional walnut baklava was our favorite.

Location notwithstanding, Kabob-ster was a great place for lunch (and if you make a right turn out of the parking lot, then the location really isn’t a big deal). We enjoyed the food and couldn’t complain about the price of $16.28 (8.95 for the falafel plate and $5.95 for Philip’s wrap with no side, plus water to drink).

If you like Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food, give Kabob-ster a try!

Kabob-ster is located at 1408 Gunbarrel Road, Suite 111, Chattanooga, TN 37421. They are open Monday – Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday – Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. You can call Kabob-ster at (423) 475-5370. For more information, you can check out Kabob-ster’s website, kabob-ster.com or find Kabob-ster on Facebook.