3511 Chouteau Avenue
Saint Louis, MO 63103
Saint Louis City County
Phone: (314) 772-2645
Fax: unknownWebsite: no website on fileEmail: no email on fileHours: unknown
by Seema F. on After reading about Zahav being a tapas restaurant, I was a bit apprehensive to go there for my birthday dinner. I can now say that I was pleasantly surprised. Unlike most tapas places I've been, Zahav actually has pretty good food. It is true, the serving sizes are not that big, but the secret to leaving full is Laffa (essentially a pocketless pita). For a table of 4 people, they start you off with a tiny bowl containing 3 pickles and 3 olives, and a condiment dish with about 3 teaspoons of spicy condiments: Zatar powder, red pepper paste, and green pepper paste (the latter two were surprisingly hot). Both pickles and spices are refillable for free, so don't be shy. There were 4 of us, and the waitress suggested we order 3 dishes each, which is much like the fixed price menu. Instead, we ordered a small Salatim and Hummus, and 6 dishes. They will tell you that the small is for 2 people, and the large is for 4, but we found the small to be more than enough for 4 people (proviso to follow). You get a tower of 8 "salatim" which they describe as "salads", but they are more like the falafel toppings you would expect from a condiment bar at a falafel place like Maoz. Don't get me wrong, they were good, but the quantity of everything but the hummus was off, and for some reason, they only gave us one laffa for our table of four, and made us wait about 15 minutes for more. Perhaps people don't usually require more, but this is the secret to maximizing the minuscule portions of salatim (~2 tbsp of each item) and eating the very ample portion of ultra rich (read: 50% tahini) hummus at all. We treated it like Indian food, eating everything with the bread. Consumed in this fashion, it was good, and certainly better than eating your pickled carrots straight-up. The other dishes we got were haloumi(fried cheese), cauliflower, balkan pastel, hangar steak, lamb/beef kebab, and the chicken. All of those were well executed and nicely plated. The haloumi was a lot like an Indian fried paneer, and they served it with a nice fig paste/sauce. The cauliflower was also fried with a green yogurt-chutney sauce, and the Balkan Pastel was a cupcake-sized pastry with a moist and tender minced lamb filling. The chicken was served with a minty yogurt sauce that tasted rather Indian to me, and not very exciting. The hangar steak with eggplant, however, was very good, but they only give you 3 tiny chunks. Finally, the dessert was a bit of a disappointment. We got baklava and the chocolate semifreddo. As I expected, $8 only gets you a small square of baklava (~1.5"x1.5") and a dollop of lemon cream. I've eaten a lot of baklava in my day, some actually in the Middle-East, and it is always dripping with honey. Here it was oddly dry, crackly like a pork rind, and everything about it was pretty mediocre. Overall, I really recommend Zahav, but you should know what you're getting into when you go there, as server recommendations can be a bit misleading.
by Cathryn Galentine on This place is pretty big and pretty trendy, not in a bad way. I came here for Halloween, they advertised no cover before 11, when we arrived at 10 there was a 20 dollar cover... kind of lame but I had fun nonetheless. There were four different dance floors, all spinning different genres of music (hip hop, drum n bass, electronic). Decent place for a dance party, drink before you go though, the bar ain't cheap.
