Queen of Sheba — Restaurant in Memphis

(Germantown and Cordova Rd location) Ordered many items and most were good but vegetable soup had a hair in it and it didn't look like a hair from your head. This is the reason for 1 star. Prior to seeing the hair, I ate several spoonfuls and it was very oily and not much veggies. Mostly just liquid. The other items we got: samosas, veggie platter, chicken shawarma were all pretty good but not great. The good was overshadowed by the hair incident that happened at the beginning. The waiter said sorry but then came back with another cup of soup. I refused it. A cook or owner never came out and apologized. It felt like a "my bad" vibe and now let's go on like nothing happened.

Servers were friendly and very attentive but didn't seem like experienced wait staff. For eg

1. She would not clear away the empty plates and platters unless you asked. And then she would only take enough for one trip and not come back and get the rest unless you asked again.
2. She told me to serve myself this Yemeni tea they have in canteen far away from our seat but I was inside a booth with someone on the outside so that would be very inconvenient to keep getting up for these very small styrofoam cups they had for us to use. She did end up bringing it to me 2x but it was like I'm doing you a favor. Not rudely at all but it was like this is how we do things there.
3. She never explained we are supposed to get and pay the check ourselves from the reception desk/register. We had to figure it out.

Overall, the ambiance felt like a medium-clean lunch room rather than a really nice restaurant. For example, the napkin holder was in a tray that has a compartment for condiments like bottles of hot sauce or whatever. The compartments were all empty and there were lots of crumbs in there. So it seems like they are just not wiping things down regularly and diligently. The bathroom was the same - not dirty or very clean, somewhere in the middle but no paper towels. This place needs more attention on cleanliness (hair in food is not ok) and training staff a bit more. I will say there seemed to be a slight language barrier with our server so that caused some confusion with our communication. However I think she did the best she could and we tipped her.

Picture: hair on plate to the left, it was in the soup and I...

This restaurant was sadly disappointing, I really don't see how it has 4.5 stars at the time of writing this. The place was almost completely empty on a Friday night, which should have been telling. We were a group of six, even though we were seated right away it took about 5 minutes for anyone to come over to take our drink order. Then it was another 10 minutes or so before a different person came to take our food order, even though one person still hadn't received their tea yet. Then the salad came (everyone's combined onto one plate, with smaller plates that we needed to portion ourselves), but we didn't get any utensils until after all the rest of the food came. I ordered the large Lamb Haneeth because I intended to bring some home for lunch leftovers, but another one of our party ordered the small Lamb Haneeth. The only difference was the larger dish had more rice, it had the same amount of lamb and wasn't worth the extra $6. Plus, the "vegetables" that it came with were actually potatoes (and two pieces of okra). Why do we need potatoes with a plate full of rice? The food itself tasted fine, but didn't really stand out - I'd say it was "Meh". When we indicated we didn't need anything else, they never brought us any check. We eventually figured out that we just go up to the counter to pay, but even that was confusing because every check included a summary of the entire table's order rather than just what we paid for. While the people seemed nice enough, and the lemonade was absolutely delicious, there isn't any chance we'll...

I heard about this place from my Yemeni friend. At last decided to hit the place for dinner. We came for the dinner. Overall, the food is pretty good here, but the customer service is worst. So when we both the girls came inside, nobody was there to attend us. We stood for a while, and then decided to walk straight at the counter. There was a guy, quite young at age showed us a table. We sat and then again nobody came to take any order. We walked to the counter and gave the orders, and even had to ask for the glasses of water! We started with coffee. The coffee was decent, however extremely sweet for me. We ordered a sampler platter as an appetizer, which was great. The food was good, so was the portion size. The freshly baked tandoori roti ( bread) was terrific. In the main entree we ordered a plate of rice with two kinds of meat (chicken and beef). The aromatic rice with the spicy meat was terrific. The amount was pretty good for us. There were many options written as dessert, however only baklava was available. We ordered a plate that comes with two pieces. The baklava was decent, however, not the best one that I have had. I don’t have much complaints about the food but the customer service was terrible. Even when the final check arrived, the prices not properly billed. The prices for the coffee was overly charged . However, we were in a hurry and just paid that without...