So now I'm a restaurant critic

I never intended to do restaurant reviews, but that's right out the window.

Disclaimer: there are many words following that will be misspelled, incorrect, inconsistent, and possibly flat out wrong.

My wife and I went to Lebanese Taverna in Baltimore tonight. This may have changed my life. I knew I liked hummus and babaganush, but tonight I discovered that Lebanese food kicks ass. We had something called "mezza", which amounts to a platter with several small portions of different things. We had babaganush (eggplant pureed with olive oil and tahini), hummus (same thing, but chick peas instead of egplant), falafel (fried patties of chickpea and something green), mousakka (eggplant stewed in tomatoes), swiss chard in tahini sauce, tabouleh (parsley/tomatoes/wheat with olive oil), and grape leaves wrapped around something the waiter assured me was vegetarian. There were also some sausages fried with onions, a pastry containing beef, lamb, and pine nuts, and something that looked like a meaty falafel. We enjoyed an unassuming bottle of wine, which turned out to be perfect since it stayed out of the way of the riot of flavors going on with the meal. We finished off with Arabic/Turkish coffees and some baklava.

The food was amazing. Neither one of us knows much about Lebanese food (other than that it's similar to Egyptian), so there's the chance that we mixed up the condiments and did the Lebanese equivalent of spreading strawberry jam on a pepperoni pizza. I don't care even if we did. The babaganuch was very good, but the hummos was the best I've ever had. It had just a hint of sweetness to it, like someone was walking past carrying vanilla beans. The taboole was so fresh it brought tears to my eyes (partly because while we were at the beach, my parsley dried out and died, but mostly because it was so good). My wife enjoyed the sausage, but it didn't seem to be anything special. She was more fond of the pastry/meat (I think they may have been called "kibba"). Also, "Turkish" coffee, as far as I can tell, means "you aren't sleeping tonight. Tomorrow doesn't look good either. By the way, you can fly."

The wait staff was attentive, and seemed genuinely pleased to answer questions about the food. At one point, there was a translation error (strained yoghurt != sour cream), and our waiter seemed a little bit offended that we might mistake a staple of his native land's cuisine with a spoiled milk product. He went so far as to explain how to prepare several of the things we ate tonight.

We would have been hard pressed to break a hundred dollars, but we hit fifty without even trying. Well, throw in a generous tip, and we were close to a hundred, but we also had a bottle of wine, dessert and coffee. I someone's looking for a nice anniversary dinner I can't say enough good things about this place. You cannot find a place more tailor-made for mixed marriages (or marriage-like domestic arrangements) where one partner is vegetarian and the other not. In fact, it was that facet that caught my wife's eye when she read about this restaurant in the Sun.