Babani's Kurdish Restaurant

Click on link to get directions in Google Maps
Click here to go to their site

Babani's is the first Kurdish restaurant I tried. For people who don't know Kurdish...Kurdistan is a group of land near the borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria & turkey. The food style is close to Mediterranean ..though I could not find any falafels there..

The restaurant board is visible from 94w near the St Paul downtown on the right side. I remembered only the Kurdish Restaurant and the Google search easily yielded the results. One strange thing is it did not take me to their official website ...got this website after I went there.

The commute and parking is a bit difficult but if you go after 4:30 pm you should get some free parking on the road.

Coming to the good part..the restaurant had a decent ambiance and the food was much better than expected. We had only 3 items from the menu a soup, a salad and an entree.
Soup was by far the best of the lot. In fact it was one of the best soups we ever had. Niskena was the name of the soup and it was made with red lentils with very few spices. It was creamy and delicious. Make sure you also order the bread which went well with this soup.
Tanyata was the salad we had..And I think it is a name that they came up for the salad ..it is essentially Half Tabouli salad and half jajic(Cucumber in youghurt sauce with few spices) Salad was also pretty good.
We had Briyani for the Entree and it was very similar to the Indian/Pakistani Briyani with very subtle differences. By chance all the things we ordered ended up to be Vegetarian. I am hoping I will go there again and try some meat entrees. will update the post then.

On the whole this is definitely worth a try...and definitely worth the circles we made to find a parking space near the restaurant.