Little Istanbul Restaurant — Restaurant in Philadelphia

UPDATE:

Perhaps I spoke too soon. I recently dined at Little Istanbul and the food and service was absolutely TERRIBLE! It started with the seating arrangement. Everything was cordoned off or reserved I am assuming for Ramadan. We were seated directly by the door and a cold draft came in every time someone entered. I asked if we could be seated somewhere else and they said no. When my daughter's food (chicken nuggets) arrived they were as hard as a hockey puck. The waiter was reluctant to provide better food but we insisted. Lastly my wife ordered lamb chops. They were as tough as leather. Again, the waiter acted as if it was normal and they caught an attitude. To make matters worse, upon finishing my food they actually charged for what I ate and the drinks!! Where is the customer service at in this equation? Maybe that is customary in Turkey but it is not in America. MF Little Istanbul and I won't be ever going back there and I hope they go out of business or get shut down by the city! Piss poor service and lousy food.

I would like to give this restaurant 5-stars on every factor. The food is DELICIOUS, the prices are fair and they give you more than your monies worth in my opinion. The staff is very attentive and the atmosphere is in my opinion like Turkei. We frequent the restaurant on a regular basis and we love the food. I accidentally left my hat there and I wasn't able to get back to pick it up until a month later. When I inquired about it, the owner/manager retrieved it and gave it to me. I was very impressed with this honesty because the hat is a limited edition and not in available to the general public. Another great thing is the food is well prepared and it is one of a few restaurants that you can reheat the food the next day and it still taste great. I highly recommend...

We have been ordering from Little Istanbul week after week for at least 2 months. Some weekends we ordered twice just because the food was so incredibly delicious.. We did not have one bad dish. The baba ghanoush is off the charts.

Unfortunately, for the past two weeks the food has just been bad. Really bad. Last week two items were missing from my order. I spend at the very least $100 here every weekend. I called and let them know that items were missing. The gentleman I spoke to said that I hadn’t even ordered there. Then he said that I did order there but that they had put the items in my bags and the driver must’ve taken it. I tried to explain that I order there every week and love their food but that they had made a mistake. This guy just would not listen. Additionally our salad went bad the very next morning. Normally we have leftovers for lunch the next day. The salad was already bad.

This week the grape leaves that are usually plump with flavorful rice and perfectly prepared were soggy and virtually empty of rice. I took a picture. It’s insane. There is no rice inside. Whoever was making them did a terrible job. They were covered in salt and soggy. The salad was bad. It already tasted like acetone. The lamb Gyro was dry and almost tasted like dog food. Once again there was no baba ghanouj in my order. I called and spoke to a gentleman who apologized and said they misunderstood my instruction and put the baba ghanouj inside of a pita. Perfectly understandable. Except, the amount of baba ghanouj inside of the pita amounted to about 3 tablespoons. 3 tablespoons for seven dollars? I don’t think so. have no idea what happened over the past two weeks. But this place has gone totally downhill. I will not be ordering...

This cost me more than $35 for lunch. I received the appetizer with the spinach it's supposed to be warm and it comes with a small little takeout cup of the Cucumber dressing. I found those little spinach rolls void of flavor. The soup I is the meat kind of a dumpling soup that I'm not impressed because there's little pieces of meat in there that are not tender. Again it just tastes like a light beef broth with dill in it. It does have chunks of potato and carrots in it and it's not a bad soup. I also have the lamb kebabs with rice and salad entree. It's in a tin as the others and the salad is some iceberg lettuce a couple pieces of onion two slices of tomato and I think some little bit of grated carrot with no dressing at all nothing came with it for dressing so I used some of the Cucumber dressing from the appetizer on it. The rice is interesting and I like the rice but there are four chunks of lamb that I'm not sure that it is lamb and it is tough it is way overcooked and tough in so much that I had to rip it apart and I gave it to my dogs there was no flavor to it just dried out meat. I also asked for the two-piece baklava that are very small. When I got there which was my first time I didn't know that I could pick a different baklava I didn't know there were choices at all. They gave me one with a lot of pistachio crushed nuts in it and I probably would have liked a different one better. I feel bad because I wanted to like it and enjoy a new cultures food but I don't see myself going back for dried meat and having to spend that kind of money and not...