One of my favorite Food Network shows, Diners Drive-Ins and Dives, has been featuring many restaurants in the Twin Cities lately, which is super exciting, and I recently saw this in one of their episodes.
Holy Land.
It’s a deli/grocery/restaurant place that specializes in Arabic, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern foods, located in the Northeast Minneapolis neighborhood.
We’ve been here before, but at that time we just visited the grocery store and we didn’t eat.
So when I saw Mr. Fieri giving a huge compliment on their hummus, I couldn’t wait to go check out the restaurant.
We had an appetizer plate.
On the place came hummus, baba ghanoush “ghannuj”, falafel, and stuffed grape leaves.
It came with a basket of pita bread.
Everything on the plate was absolutely delicious!!
Loved the hummus, but the baba ghanoush was one of the best I’ve ever tasted.
It has a wonderfully strong roasted flavor and it really sets theirs apart from other restaurants. It’s not overly garlicky, either, which I often do not care for.
The stuffed grape leaves were very tasty, too.
The first time I ever tried stuffed grape leaves were from cans, and they were terrible.
It’s a shame to sell those poor quality canned foods.
Their falafel was great, too.
Since we didn’t know the plate would come with bread, we also ordered a spinach pie.
Well, we were glad we did.
Although it was a lot of food (we took almost all the pita bread home), we loved everything we ordered.
The spinach pie was packed with a lot of spinach, and served with cheese and cucumber sauce.
Very very flavorful!!
They also had some great looking meat rotisserie.
I like restaurants that have an open kitchen.
I could watch them work in the kitchen like this all day long!
They have a bakery section right next to the dining area, and I was looking forward to check it out after our lunch.
All the baked goods looked fresh and smelled great.
The ingredients looked pretty good.
When I say good, they are simple and I know what they are.
Seriously, where in the U.S. can you get Iraqi Tandori Bread?!
These sweets looked great too, and I was so tempted to get something.
Well, next time for sure!
This is the kind of place I wish we had in our neighborhood so that I could walk to get fresh quality tabbouleh or falafel for lunch, snack, or dinner, or Iraqi Tandoori bread!
But it’s close enough, so I’m sure we will go back very soon.
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