Saha

I really enjoyed my experience at Saha and “felt” like I loved the food, but in retrospect, I was somewhat let down to realize that almost every dish we got I’d rate 3 stars. The service was stellar and the menu was fascinating, but I wouldn’t be as quick to recommend most of our adorable waitress’ highly recommended dishes.

The salmon baklava ($13) was as good and interesting as we hoped. The salmon was under a sweet paste wrapped in phyllo dough and balanced the sweet and savory better than the ravioli. The shiitake mushroom ravioli ($10) was more mixed. It was somewhat typical pasta with a somewhat typical mushroom filling covered in a sauce that was much less typical. The sauce was semi creamy with a strong mix of red pepper and sweet mango and honey. The juxtaposition was interesting but reminds you of the difficulty of combining these different flavors and makes you appreciate when other restaurants pull it off. The lahem sougar ($13) came highly recommended and came with better than usual grass-fed lamb chunks, but I couldn’t help comparing it to the same $5 dish at Old Jerusalem. The lamb was on top of a very smoky hummus with pine nuts and surrounded by pita, but definitely not something I would make a signature dish in a restaurant like Saha. Our final dish was the spicy scallops and fava ($14) which consisted of four scallops in a spiced sauce that was not nearly as strong as the one on the ravioli. The scallops were soft, albeit chewy, with the same quality taste I expect from most scallops, but nothing about them was a knock out.

Despite having tried the most highly recommended dishes here and not being blown away, I’m still interested in coming back and seeing if the other dishes can reach the culinary heights that everyone on Yelp talks about.

Other than those four dishes, the experience was terrific. Our waitress (I think she was Lucy the Kiwi) was absolutely adorable, extremely helpful, and made a bought of letting us try different white wines till we found the one that fit what we were looking for. She had strong opinions on the menu which is always so much more appealing that wait staff that think everything is great and strongly recommend a shiraz that was out of this world. The atmosphere was sexy, though not as red as described on Yelp and all the staff was very friendly.