ilili

Our second stop for Restaurant Week was ilili, a vaguely clubby Lebanese restaurant near Madison Square Park. As was the case at Spice Market, we got an inordinate amount of food for our $24.07. The place was almost empty during a weekday lunch, which was too bad as the cooking was quite good, but we were glad to see that celebrity chef Bobby Flay was one of the other diners. Maybe he can give it a positive mention on Throwdown.

We started with a special drink they were serving in conjunction with Restaurant Week, a cucumber and basil lemonade, which was delicious but so summery as to make us wonder if they forgot to turn the pages in their calendar.


The service was very friendly and enthusiastic, but, oddly, they brought all of our dishes at the same time, so we went from having an empty table to having more food than we knew what to do with. Our appetizers were a hearts of palm and artichoke salad that had a snappy lemon flavor, and a bowl of tabbouleh, a little heavy on the parsley but still satisfying.



As mains, we got a choice of sandwich or kebab plus side. We went with what turned out to be a very tender lamb dip, a huge portion of falafel on flat bread with mint and spicy tahini, Phoenician fries with garlic whip on the side, and grape leaves drenched in oil. It was too much!





And yet we valiantly made room for dessert: awaimat, Lebanese beignets drenched in orange blossom syrup, and the ilili candy bar, a slab of chocolate served with pistachio and fig caramel smears and a little pot of more chocolate. Maybe all the oil dulled our taste buds, because the chocolate was textured but curiously unflavorful. The donuts, in contrast, were syrupy and perfect.