Tamra Grill Catering — Restaurant in Saratoga

Formerly known as Saratoga Corner Cafe, the restaurant underwent a rebranding to more accurately reflect the delicious food it serves. It's previous name was low key and gave me the impression it was an American style kind of soup and salad place. Luckily my wife and I decided to try it out and had our minds blown. I moved up from LA which, in my opinion, has a greater variety, higher quality and a lot tastier food for a better price. Until this place, there wasn't a restaurant up in NorCal that I wanted to routinely patronize or would think of instantly if I was hungry, until I came here. The food is excellent (though NorCal will never beat SoCal prices just cause... rent is too damn high). Their meat dishes (lamb and beef are ones I've had) consistently sooooooo tender and well seasoned. I've gone to Mediterranean restaurants where the meat might be dry or salty or too charred or all of the above, and maybe there's sweet sauce to try and cover all that up.... But here, none of the above. There's sauce, but it's there to complement it. Tamra also has a dipping condiment appetizer with their pita bread that everyone should get if you have at least 3 people. You can pick from things like hummus, babaganoush (sp, Google didn't autocorrect?), taboulah (sp?) and a number of other really good options that I don't remember the names of.

The restaurant itself is tucked in a tiny strip mall (not sure if that's what it's called) next to a gas station. The setting is quite intimate cause it's a little smaller. The parking lot is a little small too but appropriate for the tiny strip mall it is. We've gone on weekends and there haven't been waits when...

Disappointing. Mediocre food, mediocre service, and an obvious lack of thought that went (or shall I say didn't) go into the design choices for the ambiance.

Some examples-. The burger was about a 4oz patty on a stale ciabatta bun. The patty was piping hot served ontop of the arugula and tomatoe, with feta cheese on top of the patty. What this does is wilts the veggies and turns the bottom bun into a sloppy soupy mess. The bechamel sauce on the moussaka was grainy and and floury, not silky and creamy as it should be. The lamb shank which the server kept saying will "melt like butter" melted more like titanium- hard undercooked and rubbery. Finally the falafel salad was an uninspiring bowl of chopped Romain with 4 lead filled falafels- I could have used them as sinkers on my fishing line.

Ambiance- the selection for serving plates was mess. Appetizer sampler served in small dishes designed for sauces, and not spreads, giant wood planks that made the food served look small and meager, salt and pepper shakers from the dollar store...you get the idea. Finally the tables outside were covered in slick vinyl, they were all wobbly (we had to shove napkins under them So the water glasses didn't slide off), and the chairs were hard metal that left your tail bone praying for an icepack after a long meal.

All in all it's clear they have good intentions just terrible execution.

Hopefully they can turn it around and make necessary...

This review is for lunch. We went there around 1pm expecting to be in and out relatively quickly as there was only 2 other tables seated at the time, but it ended up taking a lot longer than it should have. Had to flag down someone to take our order (and had to do the same at the end to get our check). Ordered two wraps with side dishes. The side dishes didn't get served at the same time as the wraps (were told that the chef lost our side dish ticket), so it didn't arrive until we were about 3/4s done with our wrap. If they had mentioned that the side dishes don't come with any kind of bread we would have ordered some, but nothing was said and it didn't come with any. Which left us wondering how we were supposed to it. The babaganoush's flavor was too much on the smokey side. The hummus was blah, The ratio of ingredients in the tabbouleh was weird making the green onion the dominant flavor and the matbukha was nothing to write about.

The laffa wraps were poorly constructed with one side consisting of just onions and tomatoes and all the meat on the other side. The bites of lamb that I got were pretty good, but not enough of it to make it something I would order again. There's a lot other restaurants around here that have pretty decent shawarma wraps and this one was probably in the bottom 5% of the ones I've tried.

Service was slow. Food wasn't great. A lot better options out there in...