Kosher Food and Drink

This review is part of a series of restaurant reviews conducted while my family was on vacation in Houston. It was an amazing opportunity to try many kosher restaurants in this growing Jewish community.

Saba’s Grill and Wok (5413 S Braeswood Blvd, Houston, TX 77096(832); 834-5595; sabasgrillandwok.com; under HKA supervision) is the meat counterpart to Saba’s Restaurant (a pizza place I previously reviewed). It is located in a somewhat vacant plaza that leaves plenty of parking.

The restaurant is tastefully appointed inside, and a real step up from its dairy counterpart. It does suffer a bit from what appears to be some indecision about whether it wants to be a Jewish deli or a sit-down place; the service was somewhat diffident and not terribly friendly. I got the impression the server/deli-counter person/phone answerer was rather over-worked. You’ll get your food eventually, but in terms of friendly service, it was not really acceptable.

The menu is simply gigantic. Take a look at this photo:

There’s like four screens of tiny type menu. It is completely overwhelming. They are not kidding around with their wok and grill name; they’ve got a ton of options here. (If any Baltimore natives are familiar with Kosher Bite in the 90’s, it is like that.)

The other thing I want to note about this place is that it’s pretty cheap for sit-down. Most of the dishes are in the $10-$20 range, which is about what I pay for fast casual back home – the sit-down place is considerably more. This isn’t license to let things slide, but it’s one of the more affordable kosher meat dine-in options I’ve seen in a while.

After a lot of discussion, we eventually ordered at the counter and sat down. I ordered the steak tacos. My wife had the steak wrap. The kids got a steak sandwich and the pulled beef tacos. For appetizers, we got the arayes and the shawarma fries.

The arayes were extremely good. Crispy charred pita outside, well-spiced ground beef on the inside. I’ve tried my hand at making them from time to time, and I do alright, but these were really well-done. The shawarma fries were also good, albeit it’s hard to screw up french fries and shawarma as a concept. A little more effort with the french fries might have distinguished it more.

Our entrees arrived, and I was maybe not as taken with those. My steak tacos, while plated nicely, had too much Israeli salad and not enough steak, and what steak there was was not seasoned very well (possibly at all). The tacos included a tasty spicy sauce and some lime, but no included spoon for getting said sauce in tacos. They would have been better off simply doing more with the tacos before they hit the plate. Everyone else’s entrees had exactly the same problem; the meat was just way too bland, with an apparent expectation that the customer would fix it themselves somehow.

It’s entirely possible that we simply ordered too much beef, and that this place isn’t good at straight beef. Maybe they’re good at other things! But the experience was just not great with our entrees, and the disinterested service doesn’t really make me want to go back unless I’m really in the mood for some kosher Chinese (my understanding is that Saba’s Grill and Wok is the only game in town for that).

The good news here, as it were, is that these are all solvable issues, and they may not even be that difficult to fix. Raise the prices a touch, get the service to where it should be, and revisit the recipes. The structure of a really good restaurant is here, and it just needs a bit of polish to make it the restaurant Houston deserves.