FOOD: Café Nessma Gets a Second Opinion

By JIMMY SCARANO
Falls Church Times Staff

January 1, 2010

Back in February 2009, the Falls Church Times’ George Southern profiled Café Nessma, a no-frills Lebanese restaurant just getting started in the City’s West End Plaza (map).  I had lunch there a few weeks later, and though the food was just fine, it wasn’t memorable enough to warrant a return trip.

It turns out I didn’t need to go back to get another taste—Nessma came to me.  In September the restaurant signed up for a booth at the Taste of Falls Church, where it served falafel sandwiches and savory meat and spinach pies.  I had no choice but to sample the offerings (remember, I was a food judge that day), and I must say that I was intrigued.  The food was lukewarm but had potential to be good.  The falafel sandwich, in particular, would have been very good had the chickpea patties been freshly fried and the bread been a little less prone to falling apart. (Nevertheless, Café Nessma took 2^nd place in the competition, behind Open Kitchen.)

That glimmer of hope led me back to Nessma a few times to taste the sandwich in its true form and try some other dishes.  When I ordered the falafel, Chef Hassan Rahim took a lumpy mixture out of the fridge and scooped rounds of it into the fryer.  Yes, fresh!  The well-crisped fritters were accompanied by lettuce, tomatoes, parsley, Lebanese pickles, and an extremely generous (perhaps too generous) slathering of tahini, the ubiquitous sesame seed paste most famous for its inclusion in hummus.

The result was a wrap that outshined the Taste of Falls Church version easily.  My only gripe is that the pita bread rolled around all that goodness was, yet again, a poor vessel for the filling.  Straight from a bag and barely holding its shape, it had no redeeming features at all.

A sampling of some of the other menu items revealed similar annoyances.  On one visit the so-called tomato and pepper dip was actually a hearty stew-like concoction that contained chickpeas.  Dip, it most certainly was not, but I enjoyed it nonetheless and ordered it again, only to get served an ice-cold, chickpea-less chunky canned tomato dish with little flavor.

There have been kibbeh issues as well.  The meat and bulgur patties are easy to find but hard to get good versions of.  At Nessma I was served two very different kibbeh on two occasions.  One lunch the little football-shaped pies were crisp, savory, and irresistible.  The next they were oil-laden and heavy.

I’ve also tried the grape leaves, hummus, foul muddamas, and beef shawarma sandwich.  All were fine but I can’t say I’m clamoring to have any again.

I’m not saying Nessma is a bad restaurant by any stretch.  The food is very basic Middle Eastern fare, that’s all.  Basic isn’t such an awful thing.  If you’ve got a craving for Middle Eastern flavors, will Nessma suffice?  I think so.  Just don’t expect to be bowled over.

Perhaps change is in the air, though.  A few days ago I noticed a new takeout menu featuring a few new menu items.  Starting next week, Nessma will serve daily specials of homey Arabic food, including maklouba (called “Makloubi” on the menu), a sort of upside down rice casserole dish, as well as mujadarah, a lentil and caramelized onion sauté served with rice that I’ve had several times before and can be delicious when done right.  There will also be “Lebanese style” fried chicken wings tossed with cilantro, lemon, and garlic.  Those have got to be good.

So the jury’s still out on Nessma.  The restaurant is still growing and changing (in addition to the new menu it recently annexed the space next door and now serves hookah at night).  If it fine-tunes the execution of some dishes and shows some consistency down the road ,there’s no telling what could happen.