The darkness of that 80’s cigarette-stained basement was ever suffocating. Pallid and lethargic in my seat, a savior approached.

“Come with me if you don’t want to suffer the feeling of being overfull!” The Afghan held out his hand, helping me rise from the torture chair of another American food-chain restaurant, where it is believed that a gallon of fry oil and butter is a reasonable spice for everything.

“I do not know if I can suffer anymore.” I lamented to him with one of my arms holding up my stomach while the other was wrapped around his shoulder as he dragged me out of that darkness. Upon reaching the safety of a well-lit Omaha street, he set me to lean against my midnight ride and gave me an apologetic look, saying that which I feared,

“Your editor found me; said she is sending you out again.”

“No more." My voice croaked hoarse. Eyes shut; I called out in my soul, ‘Can I take anymore?’

Reviewing restaurants was making me fat and slothful.

“This one is different," he assured me.

I didn't think I was ready, but after all the shady corner tables of the world we had survived together, I believed him.

During a night of traditional American recovery (groaning, grumbling, binge-watching shows, ten hours of sleep), I did my research on the new locale for Daily Record readers:

Zaytuna: Mediterranean Cuisine’s beginnings are truly the epitome of the American dream: two young brothers, Ahmad and Mahmod Al-Ramadan, fled from the Syrian civil war, moved to Jordan, and were eventually able to immigrate to the United States. However, upon arriving in Omaha, they found it lacking in its quality of chicken shawarma, and so they started a food truck. Finding success, they moved into the Inner-Rail at Aksarben, then expanded once again to the new location where the Afghan and I met.

Just outside its excellent and central location, beside Nebraska Furniture Mart, “Zaytuna” is optimally placed for good traffic. Just inside its doors, visitors enter into a fresh, and vibrant setting. Clean and well-lit too. The restaurant gave off the opposite of many old, “hearty" (...heavy) American restaurants. With soft tans, easy, vibrant green colors, and even little olive branches sitting in tiny glass vases of water, one would feel like they were on a Mediterranean coast.

I ordered the Zaytuna Mix with a bowl of lentil soup, while my companion opted for the beef shawarma that came with a side of fries.

The Mix was presented beautifully: perfectly cooked ground-beef kebab laid next to small, seared chicken kebabs atop a plate of rice with a healthy side of veggies, of which some came pickled.

But first, the Lentil Soup.

In my travels, I have come to love a good soup, and this one was so good. As a writer, it is imperative that one does not overuse, or even sometimes reuse, the same descriptive words… and yet I keep getting drawn to the same words to describe the soup, and the food:

It was light, like the colors of a setting sun. Warm and seasoned perfectly, I do believe that I could have put it in a giant thermos and drank that lentil soup all day and still have not felt overfull. If anything was disappointing about the visit, it was that, like the company of a carefree and sun-touched woman smiling at you across a seaside table, one could never be satiated with any amount of her time.

The kebab of the Zaytuna Mix was spectacular. Chosen on purpose for its variety so that I could review more types of cooked dishes, I was absolutely taken away to the other side of the world. It is so easy to mess up chicken and dry it out, and yet there I was, tasting the sea. Seared just right and seasoned so well, the need never came to reach for a glass of water to quench a thirst. Perhaps it was the Mediterranean mist that kept that need away; the mist I felt when biting into the dish’s central, unsung hero in the following moments:

I have had seasoned and cooked vegetables overseas before, and never once has an American restaurant done it so well, but in the center of the plate of rice and kebab was a tomato that was most certainly hand-picked from an ancient garden that had been long ago set down by the Romans. If the lentil soup was the company of a sun-touched woman, the tomato was her kiss.

Just above the seasoned tomato, the beef kebab gave a heartiness and strength to the meal without being in any way overbearing or demanding of space inside a stomach. While rice can also make a person feel overfull like too much meat, the rice of the Zaytuna Mix reminded me of spring and a picnic in fields afar from civilization.

My Afghan friend spoke to his own beef shawarma when I remembered that I was in a restaurant in the U.S., rather than overseas.

“It’s so great, man, just juicy inside. The texture is just there.”

His meal came with a side of fries, and while I wasn’t about to grab his shawarma from him, in true American fashion, I took some of his fries (for you! the audience! I swear!)

Zaytuna continued to hit it out of the park. The fries were not oily in the slightest, nor undercooked or overcooked. Little green herbs and salt spiced them just right, dancing like birds above waves.

“Where’d you go?" My companion nodded to me, noticing my eyes had grown distant,

Into Mediterranean mists and the company of a sun-kissed woman along the sea, surely.

As I began this journey, I left with a full stomach, but without the feeling of sluggishness or slothfulness. There was no fry oil or sugar, or strange additives, or undue dressings.

Just the sea, just the sun.

Zaytuna Mediterranean Cuisine

thezaytuna.com

7204 Jones Street Omaha, Nebraska

(531)466-2604

Hours: Everyday 11AM - 8PM

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to him to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.