La Mediterannée on Fillmore – San Francisco

This restaurant is a little gem on Fillmore, a super pretty street where you can find amazing, and quite expensive, shopping destinations, as Credo Beauty and Athleta, but thrift shops too and so many others, and there’s also a huge amount of food spots!

La Mediteranée was opened in 1979 and is still a family-owned and operated restaurant. Food is fresh and flavorful, and everything we tried has always been delicious. The decor is very middle-eastern – they’re Lebanese/Armenian – and so cozy. Something we immediately realized the first time we sat in the restaurant was the costumers’ age: San Francisco is a young city and on Saturdays, at lunch, it’s normal to be surrounded by young couples and groups of friends, maybe working in tech or students, but here they’re mostly middle-aged couple or even over 60. That says a lot about of restaurant in my opinion! These kind of people are not interested in the hype or coolness of a place, they just want to eat delicious food in a comfortable environment.

At our first visit, we ordered the Vegan Mediterranean Meza, a wonderful tasting of 10 house specialties like hummos, baba ganoush, falafel, tabuleh, dolma, lentils and rice – and many other I can recall. Everything was amazing and we were super full! Now that I eat meat, my favorite is the Middle Eastern Plate, where you can combine 3 dishes and a side. I always pick the Lamb Lule (grass-fed lamb meatballs served with saffron and raisins rice), the Falafel (which comes with a little serving of hummos) and I decide the third part at the last minute (this time I picked the spinach and feta fillo), always served with some green salad, that the serve with the most delicious dressing I have ever tasted. This plate is not too big and not heavy at all, and that means I can pick a dessert or, even better, take a ride to Mission District and enjoy a dairy-free ice-cream cone at my favorite shop in town – I’ll review that too.

Lorenzo ordered some baba ganoush, a falafel sandwich, and a vegetarian mushroom soup, and he can guarantee for those too!