Zooroona: A Tired Staff Fails to Deliver

The Mandwee brothers, owners of Tiffany's Wine Shoppe opened Zooroona restaurant and lounge a year and a half ago, offering authentic Middle Eastern cuisine for a reasonable price and an entranceway into the culture of the Middle East and North Africa. Several tables require customers to sit on the floor while they eat, yet standard tables and booths are still available. The dining room contains a large metal sculpture of a tree, stretching across nearly half the ceiling, one wall features a mural of dancers in the desert, and from the ceiling hang dozens of lighting fixtures, each beautiful but gaudy, different from any around it. The music was the only element of the restaurant that wasn't intrusive. Needless to say the décor is overwhelming, a hyperbole of dining in the Middle East meant to satisfy the American desire for extremes and overstimulation.

The food itself was delicious: warm pita with thick but creamy hummous served in a bowl half-full of olive oil, dark brown, hard falafel with a green, soft interior of chickpeas. Each plate was garnished with colorful beets and pickles, as good to eat as they are to look at. The abundance of olive oil gave the food a moistness without overwhelming flavor or the guilty conscious of grease.

As our waiter recommended, I ordered the Spinach Cheese Pie, but questioned his motives when my plate came out with a square slab of pie on it, obviously a dish prepared in a big pan beforehand and microwaved for individual orders. The pie was just as it seemed to be, full of spinach and cheese, delicious in its greasy splendor but only good for three or four bites, and tainted by my wondering how many days ago the pan had been prepared. Its method of preparation by microwave, however, allowed for optimal leftovers, tasting almost exactly as it had in the restaurant. Good news, since the heavy dish would take me days to consume. However, the service at Zooroona was as horrible as the food was delicious. When the restaurant first opened, servers, hosts, and the owners all loved to talk about the renovations made to the building, plans for belly dancers and live music on the pseudo-stage near the mural, and the inspirations for starting the restaurant. Guests were invited to relax as they ate, drawing on the emphasis on hospitality.

Our server, Paul, sat down at our table with us to explain his recent conversion to Islam, although it was a busy Saturday night, and toward the end of our meal Paul showed us how to properly pour the Turkish coffee into the cups—explaining that bubbles should form while pouring and that we shouldn't drink the contents on the bottom of the kettle for fear of drinking grounds. In the beginning, employees were still excited about working under the welcoming ideologies set forth by the Mandwee brothers—Zooroona itself being a word that means "come visit us" in Arabic.
A year and a half later, the excitement is gone. Our server, instead of honoring the fashion of courses, did not wait until we had finished our appetizers before bringing entrees, but littered our table with new plates among half-finished old ones, resulting in an uncomfortably crowded table (a phenomenon I haven't experienced since eating at Texas Corral). His hurriedness—either from trying to turn his table before the dinner rush or from inability to time when to enter orders into the kitchen—ruined the experience. He was a tall, somewhat chunky, white man with ray-ban glasses who, although he spoke in polite terms, clearly treated his job as a job (not an adventure), his coworkers and coworkers (not family), and his customers as customers (not friends).
The manager, too, stood behind the bar stocking glasses, hardly even observing the poor work of his staff. I suggest ordering for takeout, because the food is the only good thing about Zooroona.