My husband and I recently had the opportunity to join Jason and Rachel Perlow at Tabboule in Ridgewood. Tabboule offers fine Lebanese cuisine in a casual, comfortable setting. Parking for the restaurant is easy and plentiful, as the restaurant is located in the Kings Shopping Center on N. Maple Ave.
We began our mid-day marathon eating session with traditional Lebanese Za’atar Chips. Rich with spices of thyme, sesame and sumac, very savory, very addicitive! Red Lentil soup accompanied the chips, and Rachel had the fabulous idea to sprinkle some crumbled Za’atar chips on the soup. It was perfect; like Saltines in chicken noodle soup - only much better!
Next the cold appetizers arrived tabbouleh, hummus, babaghanoush, stuffed grape leaves, and muhamara.
This past March, I graduated from the French Culinary Institute in New York City. Six months and six hundred hours of grueling and intensive instruction in the classic culinary arts with top distinguished chefs taught me more about cooking than I could relay in one hundred Top Five lists. The experience was truly invaluable and a lifelong dream come true. But if I really boil the experience down and condense it (pardon my choice of words) a few key pieces of advice from my amazingly talented chef instructors stand out in my mind and will stay with me forever.
According to Chef David Drake, there are two kinds of chefs. There are those who grow up on the apron strings of their mother and grandmother, comfortable in the kitchen from their earliest memories, and then there are those who come from families with terrible cooks. Drake comes from the latter type.
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