V Rating: VV
Where: Manuka Terrace, Flinders Way, Manuka ACT
When: Lunch and dinner, 7 days
Entrees: $4-$11, mains: $16-$17
Does not take bookings

Don’t make the mistake of taking a bottle of wine to Mecca Bah, the Moroccan and middle eastern restaurant that has added a new Canberra outlet to its Melbourne and Brisbane branches – it is fully licensed but not BYO.

After overcoming that minor embarrassment, I join my friends in the large, covered outdoor area which is on the deck of Manuka Terrace. The outdoor seating area is expansive and has a nice vibe. It is a warm enough evening, and the accordion-style glass windows are open, so it all feels pleasingly summery. After the incident with the wine bottle, we examine the wine menu and discover that the house white and red are $24 each – surely a bit steep for a house wine?

One of my friends informs me that the waitress had said she would come and “explain” the menu to us once we had all arrived. I am inherently suspicious of any place that has a menu that needs to be “explained”. I am also inherently suspicious of any place that refuses to take bookings. What is with that?

The waitress kindly informs us that the first page of the menu was mezze – “that’s kind of like tapas”, she says, in case we didn’t know. (Perhaps I am just being facetious, but if someone doesn’t know the meaning of mezze, are they likely to be aware of what tapas is?) The waitress encourages us to order several and share them. The vegetarian options on the mezze menu sound tasty: fattoush (a salad of Lebanese bread in wine), vegetarian chick pea and lentil soup, beetroot and yoghurt salad, Tunisian carrot salad, tabouleh, sweet potato felafels, olives, and bread with dips. My friend chooses the vegetarian soup ($8.50), and the rest of us decide to share the Turkish bread with dips ($11) and the carrot salad ($7.50). For mains ($16-$17), the vegetarian options are a roast vegetable tagine (“that’s like a stew served on cous cous”, explains the waitress again), and two types of Turkish pizza (“these are on a thin bread shaped like a boat and with the edges curled up”) – zucchini with cheeses, mint and lemon, and roast pumpkin, chilli, pomegranate jam and feta. On the waitress’s advice I order the zucchini pizza.

When the Turkish bread and dips arrives, it involves sizable dollops of labna, hommous and baba ghanoush, and three rather large pieces of Turkish bread. The soup comes in a very large bowl and is a generous serve. The carrot salad likewise comes in a very large bowl, but it could not be called a generous serve. In fact, the serving is hardly even the size of a side dish for one person, let alone an amount to share. It looks even more minuscule given the massive plate it comes on. $7.50 for this? The three of us who are sharing it each allocate ourselves four small pieces of carrot from the twelve on the plate. They are delectable, and so it is even more disappointing that the serve was so small. So we order ourselves another plate of bread ($4) to go with the dips, which are very flavoursome, and stuff ourselves with this.

Alas, by the time the mains come I think we have all eaten too much bread. My zucchini pizza is pleasing enough, and the lemon juice provides a nice zest to the taste of the zucchini, but I am unable to finish it. My friend who chose the vegetarian tagine says it is good, and spicy.

Mecca Bah has an interesting array of other vegetarian selections on the mezze menu, but if these were all of the same small portion as the carrot salad, then I frankly don’t think they’re worth it. The vegetarian selection in mains is OK – three dishes – but not great. I’m giving this place a VV. The food was tasty, but unduly expensive. Add to that the pricey wine and no BYO, and it made for an expensive night. Vegetarians would get more choice and better value elsewhere.

AC

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