Cafe Najla

I am happy to forgive the napkin on fire. I can overlook the messy desk at the rear of the restaurant. I was thinking generous thoughts while shivering in the dunny with the dislodged cistern. But I couldn't let go the fruit in the fattoush salad, and the gloopy strudel just made me glum.

Cafe Najla is a well-established, 100-seat, mid-range, Middle Eastern restaurant in the steadfastly mediocre cluster of Westgarth eateries. It looks like a fun cafe: the kind of place where you should be able to spend a hundred bucks and feed a few people some decent food. Indeed, when I ate here a few years ago, I remember delicate savoury pastries and excellent kebabs. The place still feels upbeat and the menu promises a nice array of dips, minced meat pastries and claypots with cous cous. Maybe I struck unlucky on a busy night, but I reckon the cafe has slipped in its six years on High Street.

Fattoush is a venerable Middle Eastern salad of lettuce, onion, fried or toasted bread and seasonal vegetables. Mint and parsley are almost compulsory. Cucumber and tomato are common. Carrot and capsicum are acceptable. But fruit? That's weird.

The grapes I could almost deal with in a cross-cultural Waldorf way. The strawberries were all wrong, though, foamy, flavourless and frankly baffling. The bread component - crumbled pita - hid under the greens like sharp pebbles on a lawn.

Still, the eggplant dip was smoky and smooth, so I was prepared to write the fattoush off as a kooky but endearing folly - if the main courses were as good as they sounded.

First, though, we had to wait for our entrees to atrophy in front of us while the perky but unfocused waiters reset tables and extinguished a flaming napkin. I reckon we waited 20 minutes then I noisily stacked the plates myself and pushed them, teetering, to the edge of the table where they were rescued.

The main courses were OK. Minced beef sandwiched between two layers of kibbeh (burgul) could have been more expressively spiced and the burgul was a bit soggy, but it wasn't too bad.

The seven vegetable stew arrived way too hot: the vegetables were at a roiling boil when the claypot was placed on the table. Unsurprisingly, the root vegetables within were somewhat sludgy. Chilli was the overwhelming flavour in a dish whose success lies in its subtlety. On the up side, at least it was filling.

I wanted to give Cafe Najla a chance to redeem itself, if only because I get the feeling that its namesake owner is a lovely person. I was hoping the "famous" apple strudel would give me a chance to be positive. Oh dear. I'd stupidly thought the strudel might be famous for tasting good. Instead, its celebrity must attach to the way the sodden pastry has reconstituted into floury glue and also, perhaps, to its uneven, fridge-and-inferno warmth.

You can spend the same money and get seriously good food along similar lines at Rumi, five minutes away. Even the thrilling bar snacks at Maha in the city are at a similar price point. Sure, it's harder to get a table at Rumi and you'll end up spending more at Maha but, on the basis of my experiences at the three restaurants, it's not hard to see why.