Lebanese Restaurant Mirrors Mideast Menu

Omar Al Khyam, Lebanese Restaurant, 354 Sunset Blvd. N., Renton. 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday; 4 to 10 p.m. Saturday; closed Sunday. Beer, wine. 271-8300.

The Middle East, says Fayez Nakkour, is more than just the monotonously bleak expanse of sand featured in French Foreign Legion films. At Omar Al Khyam, the restaurant he owns, Nakkour demonstrates nightly that the Middle East has good food, and that among the best is the grilled cuisine of Nakkour's native Lebanon.

Nakkour hails from Mount Herman, near the Syrian border, and learned his trade there before immigrating to America in 1970. After working for a string of American restaurants, Nakkour decided to return to his roots in 1976, opening the first Omar Al Khyam restaurant in Seattle. Three years later, he expanded to Renton, where he has done a steady business serving South King County's sizeable multiethnic population.

Named for the Arab author of the epic Rubaiyat, Omar Al Khyam from the outside would pass for a run-of-the mill diner were it not for the plywood facade of minaret-shaped windows facing the parking lot. But inside, where the whitewashed walls are graced by woven tapestries portraying belly dancers and a pre-bombardment Beirut, lies an oasis of fine food and service that Nakkour says "resembles, but not 100 percent," an eatery from his native land.

Nakkour and his five brothers prepare the food, which he says is "the real tradition of Lebanese cooking, proper Middle Eastern foods." Savory kebabs - grilled chunks of lamb, ground beef, and chicken, flavored with sumac and spices including cardamom, coriander and garlic - top the menu.

Each dinner ($7.95 to $8.95) is accompanied by pita bread, flavored rice sprinkled with cinnamon and a salad bathed in herb dressing. All of the kebabs are excellent, but the marinated chicken Shish Tawouk is especially outstanding. The House Special ($8.95) is a good introduction to Omar Al Khyam's menu, offering the lamb Shish Kebab, ground beef Kafta Kebab, and grape leaves and cabbage rolls stuffed with ground beef and rice.

Appetizers include hommous ($3.50), a delicious dipping mixture of mashed garbanzo beans and tahini sesame paste that is served cradling a small pond of olive oil. Eaten with pita bread, it's a meal in itself.

As is the Baba Kanoug ($3.50), a creamy dip of mashed eggplant, tahini sesame paste, lemon and garlic that tastes much like salmon pate.

The deep-fried ground garbanzo cake known as Falafil is also available as an appetizer ($4.50), while the less intrepid can turn to the Omar Khyam burger ($3.50), all-American ground beef mixed with parsley and onions in the Lebanese fashion.

Nakkour is confident that his low-fat, subtly-spiced cuisine is destined to become the next wave of ethnic food, following the trail blazed by Chinese, Italian, Mexican and Thai restaurants before him.

"Everything else has been tried," he reasons. "Middle Eastern food is emerging now."

Restaurant reviews are a regular Thursday feature of the South Times section. Reviewers visit restaurants unannounced and pay in full for all their meals. When they interview members of the restaurant management and staff, they do so only after the meals and services have been appraised.