Amardeen Lebanese and Mediterranean Cuisine — Restaurant in San Diego

Overall, I would love to rate higher this restaurant but it is hard to do sadly. This is due to quality, price, and service.

Starting with the service which was very slow and we were left wondering if we needed to close the dictionary menu to trigger the ordering of food. Large menu's are baffling due to ether being the best at everything or just being okay or worse with everything. A smaller menu with what you do the best would help!

The best thing in the restaurant was the Baba Ghanouj 4/5 stars.

The Chicken Biryani was interesting we can we have never had one quite like it before! The vegetable seemed as if they came from a can of assorted vegetables and seemed out of place since they were sprinkled in. No, basmati rice could be found as well which is new and also confusing!

One of my favorite dishes to eat is Ouzi Lamb, but it was quite disappointing from this restaurant. The ouzi rice was okay which left the lamb very dry. The tzatziki would have been better with a plain yogurt instead.

In closing this rates lower then many of the same kind of restaurant in the area and in San Diego with there high prices and poor quality it is astounding. You have full price salads at 16-17 dollars, but a half salad is 13.50! Hummus, Baba Ghanouj, and all other sauce have a half and full price which is odd the and why? 7 dollars for half or 9.50 for a full order. This is much higher then other restaurant considering that there is one size at a lower cost for better quality! The price of entrees is just leaves me flabbergasted, but you get a choice of salad, lentil soup, or French fries. Prices from 25 to 36 dollars.

Update September 19th 2021:

I am going back through all my reviews of restaurants to be more stringent and to compete my due diligence of each. I have set forth three rules that all restaurant will need to follow to get a three star rating.

The three rules for restaurants is the keep it fresh, keep it clean, and keep it simple!

Getting a four or five star will become harder, but not impossible! Why? Well, people rating poor restaurants as five stars when they are barely a two or three is commonplace in Google Maps and I would like to fix...

FOOD: My husband and I went here for lunch during our anniversary, craving their salads. Needless to say, what we ordered was really good. Such a unique combination of flavor. I would definitely come back here if it weren't for the service issues we experienced.

LUNCH HOUR: Lunch hour rush wasn't all that busy when we went. There were still empty tables surrounding ours, so the waiters had no excuse in being busy. They even just stood in the back while we were eating.

PARKING: Parking sucks if you come during the lunch hour rush. There are corporate buildings a couple of blocks away, as well as other small restaurants, a CVS Pharmacy, dentist?, a gym studio all crammed into this one little plaza with Amardeen Cafe, and parking spaces are TIGHT, especially if people don't know how to park their cars.

SERVICE: Our waiters (yes, for some reason, we had 2), seemed to pass right by us all of the time. We were NEVER asked "how's everything tasting?" but I did note the same waiters walked to other people's tables and asked just that. I have no idea what we did. All we ordered were the BIG hearty salads, and we were willing to tip HUGE because the salads were soooo good! Not once did they stop by to ask us if we needed more dressing. We even had to flag them down ourselves to ask for the check when we were obviously done... something no other customer had to do because their checks were delivered like clockwork. What? Did they hate us because we prayed in the beginning to thank God for our meal? Did they not like that we ordered just salad, thinking the tip wouldn't be huge? I KNOW they weren't busy, so that can't be it. They even looked like they just started their shift, because they didn't look flustered at all. Oh well. We ended up just tipping the 15%. Psh. First impressions are everything. From the ambiance to the food... this restaurant...

If you know anything about Middle Eastern Food and Middle Eastern hospitality, you'd quickly realize that Amardeen restaurant is a complete joke. My family of 5 and I visit from Dearborn, Michigan. This is the hub for authentic middle eastern food and we are middle eastern ourselves. We saw the ratings on this place and we were excited to try it. We noticed a tray on the menu that had almost everything on it for $34. This sounded too good to be true, and I asked the waitress if this tray is a sampling/tasting tray with very small dishes for 3 people or is it enough to feed 3. She said it is for 3 people. So we ordered. And what we got was LAUGHABLE!! The bowls were the size of cat food bowls. Just look at the photo (I took it after we ate everything in .5 seconds.) They gave us 3 tiny triangles of bread. She said it's for 3 people!! 3 mice maybe!! We asked for bread about 4 more times and each time they would only put 3 or 4 small pieces and they would throw the basket on the table like they were upset! It was seriously pathetic. I guess you can easily rip off people that have never had authentic Lebanese food, but good luck with those who are familiar with it....