Just the Fatch, Ma’am

The Middle East, which is probably the best Lebanese restaurant between Hollywood and Detroit, is one of those timeless big-city places, a cavernous old storefront with the garlic pungency of a really good delicatessen, high ceilings, a takeout counter that seems to stretch on a city block. Behind the counter, the menu is neatly painted, including all the daily specials for each day of the week, in a display that reaches nearly to the top of the wall. Wailing Lebanese music blares from wall-mounted speakers, except when somebody puts on KROQ instead. Flags of all nations are mounted all around the room.

It’s nice to come in here in the late afternoon, when the restaurant is somewhat emptied out, for an indulgent lunch of smooth, cool raw kibbeh , sort of a bulgur-studded Lebanese steak tartare (made from lamb); to munch on pickled hot peppers, sip a cold glass of Lebanese Almaza beer.

Waiters rush around with the bowls of hummus , plates of pastry, fiery pickled turnips, bowls of garlicky lentil soup that seem to come free with almost anything you order here. (You can get salad instead of the soup, or for $1.45 extra, more of the parsley salad tabbouleh than you can eat.) A nervous-looking guy at the next table leans over and tells you how far he drives to come to this place--plenty far--and how disappointed he is in Perot. A large family starts in on their kebab platters as if Dad had fired a starting gun. A handwritten sign announces the existence of something called the Homey Burger, for kids.

Dinners at most other Lebanese restaurants in the West seem to revolve around an endless array of mezze , communally served appetizers scooped up with pita bread. Here, possibly because everybody pretty much gets hummus and tabbouleh as a matter of course, there is less emphasis on the smoky eggplant dip baba ghannou j, the deep-fried capsules of kibbeh , the labneh , and more on the main dishes. At the Middle East, one orders a dish of one’s own: lamb kebabs with rice, intensely herbed grilled quail, sweet nuggets of Armenian sausage, spicy-hot okra-tomato stew, a curried-vegetable stew stained with turmeric, all served with mountains of rice.

If it’s Thursday, there’ll be delicious long-cooked spinach studded with chunks of braised lamb, or peculiar, pearl-shaped couscous served with a grayish lamb stew (couscous is not, to put it mildly, a specialty of the Lebanese kitchen). If it’s Monday, there’ll be roast lamb over rice, and nice--though reheated tasting--whole chickens; if Wednesday, the Jordanian specialty mansaf lamb.

Unlike most Lebanese restaurants, the Middle East makes something of a specialty of breakfast, giant affairs of scrambled eggs with the spicy Armenian sausage sujuk , or with ground beef, or with fresh tomato. Fatch is a fantastic mess of chick peas, toasted pita, garlic and pine-nuts fried in olive oil, all doused in homemade yogurt, which any sensible person would prefer to a Denver omelet even if he or she couldn’t make much of a dent in the backpack-size pile of food. You can even, if you’re so inclined, breakfast on fresh, raw lamb liver.

At Denny’s, a breakfast special involves maybe a couple of sausages, an egg, some potatoes and maybe a piece of toast. Before 10 a.m. at the Middle East, for about five bucks, there is a $4.95 combination that includes a plate of the yogurt-tart homemade cream cheese labneh slicked with olive oil; a turnover stuffed with the thyme-like herb zaatar and a squarish sort of Danish thing with a sweetly spiced forcemeat where you might expect to find the prunes; a basket of pita; a plate of olives and pickles and another plate with onions, tomatoes and fresh leaves of mint; two kinds of cheese, one sweet and rubbery, the other hard and pungent like an aged pecorino ; a glass of hot tea; a giant bowl of foul moudamas , the herby, tart fava-bean salad that is what Egyptians traditionally have in the mornings . . . a spread that covers every square inch of space on the table, one of the best deals in town.

* Middle East Restaurant

910 E. Main St., Alhambra, (818) 281-1006. Open daily 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Beer and wine. Lot parking. Takeout and catering. Cash only. Dinner for two, food only, $12-$20.