Midtown Lunch

Westwood lunching has been on fire since the beginning of the year.  800 Degrees continues to rack up fans with their Chip(otle)izza, Yamadaya just opened a new branch on Westwood Blvd just south of Wilshire, and the anticipation over the new Five Guys is palpable on Broxton during lunch. Plus there’s Wakasan, sandwiches that run the spectrum from grossly insane (Fat Sal’s) to grossly refined (Fundamental), and a ton of Middle Eastern food. In other words, Westwood is quickly becoming one of my favorite places in L.A. to eat lunch.  But it’s not all good news.  Canary, an old Persian standby on Westwood Blvd. whose tongue sandwich made it onto JGold’s 99 Things You Have To Eat Before You Die list in 2010, has been replaced by a new Turkish restaurant called New Anatolia Mediterranean Cafe.

Westwood is known for its Persian food (Attari will ensure that we don’t miss Canary’s tongue sandwich too much), and you can find solid Lebanese food at Sunin. But Turkish? That’s a new one. Tasting Table got pretty excited about their funky lamb soup (kette pacha) but I was super curious about their two shawarma spits they had rotating behind the counter, and their $7 lunch special.

Check it out after the jump…

The menu at New Anatolia has a number of different lamb, beef and chicken options.  Most of the plates are over $10, but they have 5 different sandwich options all between $6.75 and $7.50.

I might have been pulled toward the kofte or adana, but after spotting their two glistening shawarma spits the decision was easy.  The beef shawarma, topped with what appeared to be lamb fat, looked tasty enough, but the chicken looked even better (words you will not hear me say often.)  The rotating meat had that look of haphazard waviness that comes from being freshly marinated and wrapped around the spit by hand.  How could I not?

The shiny dark chicken meat gets cut fresh off the spit, and wrapped in toasty pita bread with tzatziki, tomatoes and a raw onion mixture.

They don’t skimp on the meat, and the balance of all the flavors is near perfect.  The juicy and flavorful meat, cut by the acidity of the tomatoes and onions, and all cooled down by the delicious tzatziki.  It’s the kind of pita sandwich I could eat once or twice a week if I worked in the area.  It also makes you think… if their chicken shawarma pita is this satisfying, how good is the rest of the menu?

The chicken shawarma pita is $6.75, or you can order the $7.95 lunch special which comes with a drink and dessert. Or as I like to call it, a no brainer.  The two bite piece of baklava was impossibly moist, like a big honey filled Gusher.  And even though It went down quick, by the time it was gone Canary was a distant memory.

New Anatolia Mediterranean Cafe, 1942 Westwood Blvd. 310-446-0055