Saturday, December 10, 2011

Little Tiberias (Tiberias) 12/2011

Tiberias is a small port city with a lot of hotels which probably feed most of the tourists. Locals are more likely to frequent the small cafe restaurants offering felafel humus and salads. The only attractive restaurant that we saw was Little Tiberias, in a very short street joining the two main streets of the town. The menu, posted outside had no prices. By local standards it is quite expensive, especially when you add the almost mandatory tip. Our waitress claimed that she was working for no wage at all and only received the tips as her pay. Of course this is illegal and she may not have told me the truth but I suspect she was being quite honest. We ate here three times and enjoyed every thing we tasted.They have the usual structured menu. We shared an entree of liver pate . This perfectly smooth pate came on a bed of onion jam with plenty of light toasted white bread You could not ask for better. Unfortunately the water was undrinkable so I broke with my resolution and bought a bottle. A$6 for flat or $8 for bubbly. A pasta in cream and mushroom sauce was made from Barilla spaghetti. The pasta was OK but the sauce was super.A beef stroganoff turned out to be large cubes of very tender and tasty meat in a fairly potent pepper sauce. An interpretation of stroganof which fails to meet the most fundamental character of what defines this dish, i.e. thin sliced meet quickly cooked in a mushroom sauce.There is a great variety of additions to stroganof but these two things are central. All mains came with roast potato, carrot and zucchini. We tried several other dishes including a whole fish. We loved the presentation. It was dangerously bony but the flesh was great. White, soft and delectable. Spaghetti with shrimps was in a similar cream sauce to the mushroom one with the addition of a decent handful of shrimps. Another very good pasta. A good size beef steak with hand cut chips was not quite so successful but although not as rare as we would have liked, it was acceptable. The chef found it necessary to cut the steak into strips for us and liberally cover the whole lot with mushroom sauce. We were so pleased with these sauces that we did not want to be disappointed with any others.Yes, there is a steak under there.
Service was pleasant but rather lacking in that they brought the wrong meal on one occasion, brought only a spoon to eat the pasta and when we first entered we found ourselves standing at the door for a significant time before being shown to a table.
We did not drink wine here.
Score 14/20

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