Restaurant Review: Pyramid Café

Selfless acts of gyro-ism

By: Rob DeWalt
Published online: Friday, August 03, 2012
Appeared in: Pasateimpo

Draw a line in the sand anywhere in Santa Fe, and there’s a good chance it will bisect a plate of hummus. Let’s face it: the whirled chickpea dish has become a sight almost as familiar as the breakfast burrito in this town.

Nestled between a spice store and a Vietnamese restaurant on Cordova Road, Pyramid Café, which also has a location in Los Alamos, serves up some of the creamiest, most garlicky hummus in town, but to go there for just the hummus is to deny yourself an oasis of other flavors. Pyramid’s strip- mall facade belies its colorful, if awkwardly lit, interior. The café offers diners a choice between natural light in the front dining room and subdued lighting in the back dining room during the day. At night, both dining areas are dimly illuminated. The back room, with its colorful walls, hanging textiles, bright-red table linens, and arching swaths of shiny fabric, is more inviting, especially if you’re not in a rush.

A dinner appetizer of Mediterranean garlic-butter shrimp was just that: simple, clean flavors and plump peeled medium-sized crustaceans. The list of white wines proved uninspired, but a little squeeze of lemon cut through the butterfat in the dish nicely. A falafel plate — five crunchy- on-the-outside chickpea fritters on a bed of lettuce sided with tzatziki (yogurt and cucumber sauce), creamy hummus, herbaceous tabbouleh, and two briny dolmas (vegetable-and- rice-stuffed grape leaves) — was generous. All components of the dish were executed wonderfully, save for the main attraction. The falafel was smothered in so much cumin that the spice overpowered everything.

My equally humongous lamb and beef gyro combo plate with warm pita bread, harissa (a spicy North African condi- ment, this one made with caraway), tzatziki, basmati rice, and an included Greek salad of romaine lettuce, olives, cucumber, tomato, feta cheese, and lemony vinaigrette could have been a dinner for two. This is locally made gyro at its juiciest and finest. The meal ended with scrumptious, delicately spiced, nutty house-made baklava and a super- sweet one-two Turkish-coffee punch.

The promise of decent lamb tagine at a strip-mall restaurant is one I couldn’t have imagined being fulfilled until I tried Pyramid’s offering during a late lunch visit. Named after the vessel it’s prepared in, this slow-cooked Berber version of the dish can be sweet or savory, but either way, spices such as clove, ginger, and cinnamon make up its aromatic backbone.

Pyramid’s lamb tagine marries New Mexico lamb with potato, tomato, and black mission figs. Whole cloves and bay leaves figure prominently, and although they flavor the tagine well, they are free-floating in the dish, and nothing kills the palate quite like biting into a whole clove or bay leaf. Perhaps they need to be bundled in cheesecloth for easy removal before serving. My included cup of avgolemono, or Greek egg-lemon-chicken-egg soup with rice, was OK. The flavors were there, but the soup was lukewarm, and the rice was glaringly undercooked.

A “Philly cheese” lamb and beef gyro sandwich (on pita bread) with marvelous house-cut fries was unwieldy, and finding any Swiss cheese on this monstrosity was a chore. On that note: Does the world really need another Philly-cheese hybrid? Skip this gimmick, and go for the traditional gyro plate.

The hearty vegetarian showpiece at Pyramid is the Tunisian brik à l’oeuf, a thin, crisp pastry stuffed with mashed potatoes, parsley, and capers, and in the center of it all, an egg, its yolk running gooey and golden. If you appreciate a runny-egg breakfast for lunch or dinner, brik à l’oeuf is the Tunisian end-all-be-all. Please don’t skip the salata houriya, a shredded- carrot salad topped with crumbled feta cheese. Order it with the brik if you feel guilty about not eating your vegetables.

I took an order of spanakopita back to the office for lunch one afternoon and wasn’t disappointed. Two large wedges of spinach-and-feta-stuffed pastry made the five-minute trip well. It was a little light on flavor, but the accompanying Greek salad was bright and crisp. Pyramid uses a thin pastry other than traditional phyllo dough for both its spanakopita and brik à l’oeuf. It’s more akin to malsouqa, a Tunisian mainstay that is less brittle after cooking.

A note about service: during two sit-down meals, things went smoothly until I experienced a major lull between asking for the bill and receiving it. It seems to be an epidemic in Santa Fe, either because dining rooms are understaffed or because servers and/or managers aren’t paying attention. Whatever the reason, it leaves a bitter taste.