Cuisine:

• Coffee Houses
• East and West
• Middle Eastern
• Mediterranean

Cool Cafe Description:
Diners may need to penetrate a defensive wall of shisha-smoking students to enter Cool Café, one of the first hookah bars to appear in town, but the aromatic smoke screen can't obscure the genuinely interesting food within. Omelets, sandwiches, smoothies and crêpes all appear on the mostly-Mediterranean menu along with pastas and salads. Selecting familiar hummus from the appetizer menu thus may be required; we also recommend the mirza ghasemi, a dip of toasty eggplant, garlic and tomato. (We would avoid the bland salad Olivia with chicken, potato and peas, however.) Among entrées, the pasta Veneziana with artichoke hearts, capers and black olives (insist on kalamatas) upstages the modest décor. In the sandwich category, we would pick grilled eggplant and provolone over turkey with sprouts in an attempt to stay somewhat culturally correct. Although the wine list isn't stellar, the surprise is that there's wine at all to pair with kebabs of saffron-scented salmon. Conclude with dessert crêpes such as the totally non-Persian Nutella.


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