Nish Nush Visited 1/9/2013 2.5 Forks

Nish Nush 174 Church St., (between Duane St & Reade St), New York, NY 10013

I'm usually pretty lazy when it comes to going out for lunch during work.  But Vid recommended this place that wasn't too far from both of us, so I was eager to actually leave the office and eat something that didn't come from my cafeteria.  The outside of this place looked pretty cool.  It has this funky industrial look to it and these cool communal tables with dried chickpeas as part of the table top.

The menu here is Middle Eastern and has your typical hummus, falafel, greek salad type of foods.  For me, the best Middle Eastern place in the city (and one of the best places to eat in NYC in general) is Taim and it's really hard for me to eat any kind of Middle Eastern food and not judge it against them.  One of my favorite things at Taim is their sabich sandwich (it's an eggplant, hummus, hard boiled egg sandwich), so when I saw it on the menu here I was excited to give it a try ($8).  But when the sandwich came out, I could tell that the Taim one would still be far superior.  The one at Taim is stuffed full and brimming with ingredients.  This sandwich was low on ingredients and they could have stuffed the pita a bit fuller.  The second thing I noticed that instead of being full of eggplant and hummus, it was full of pickles.  I mean it was almost like I was eating a pickle sandwich instead of an eggplant sandwich.  I probably had about 5-6 bites before I actually got to the eggplant and when I did get to it, it was pretty thin.  I like my eggplant to be plumb and it can be a great substitute to meat, but it just didn't feel that way here.   The sandwich was ok, not great.  If I didn't know how amazing a really good sabich sandwich could be, I probably wouldn't have thought my sandwich was too bad but knowing what it's missing, I had to downgrade it to a 2.5 Forks.

Photo Credit: Yelp