Aladdin's Eatery

Great attentive service after a two cavity dental appointment. Fruit smoothie, great hummus, tiramisu rounded out the post dentist choices. Personable owner and excellent service. Nice for a mediterranean lunch or a quick dessert.

I have to update this because of the 1* ratings other have given this place. I have always liked this place and had good to great food with occasional slow service. The other night I went here and it was just perfect from the Grape Leaf appetizer to the Baklava Cheesecake. This place is under new ownership and management. They are doing great!

This is my favorite Mediterranean place in town and when I visit (as I am from Texas), I always make a point to stop here. The service is great, it's reasonably priced, the food is super healthy, and they have many, many gluten free & vegetarian options. I highly recommend the Mujadara.

I have to say, I'm very surprised that the ratings are so low. This place is a real gem!!

Loved this place at first. Best item on the menu is the chicken curry wrap. Found it after my fourth or fifth visit and never looked back.

Now onto the sad bits.

1) Often, we would go for dessert, just coffee and cake. Sometimes the cakes were to die for, and sometimes they were stale and dry. At $6.25 a slice, I really think they should toss the rest once they go stale.

2) The waitresses pressure you to order, order, order, as if they are salesmen. When we want just water, please don't screw up your nose like there's a skunk in the kitchen. Also, multiple times we felt as if our waitress had forgotten us. Once, she was so MIA we had to ask for our check at the register.

As a side note, we are amiable, accommodating people, who always tip 20-25%. So all i can think is that we were bumped down on the waitresses priorities for not ordering drinks and appetizers. (we were holding out for $3 coffees and $6 cake, which we did not order since we could not flag down our waitress.)

We have not been back in almost 6 months.

The owner is very friendly, and loves what he does.

I'm still hungry.

I went to Aladdin's for a quick lunch after a movie and ordered a lamb pita. My first bite had lamb and I was fairly satisfied with the seemingly fresh vegetables and crunchy pita.

I continued to take bites until I was about a third finished with my meal, but to my shock realized: WHERE THE HELL IS THE LAMB!? I opened the pita to find 4 small sad pieces of overcooked lamb. Wow. For $7.75, I could have enjoyed a nice rice bowl at Chipotle.

When the server finally came by to check on us, I couldn't help but explain my dissatisfaction with the meager serving. She replied, "I'll tell the cook." No apologies from the "cook" though, despite her relaying the message and me being one of 4 people in the restaurant.

Excuse me while I have a real meal, courtesy of my fridge.

This is my favorite restaurant in Toledo. The quality of food is great. It's also very healthy generally speaking and especially in comparison to other options. I'm a vegetarian, so it's nice to have a wide selection of various options to choose from. I've been coming here for 6 years. I watched the owner meet amazing weight loss goals from eating the food in his own restaurant.

For some reason, the owner who usually is there isn't there as often. Noticed this in 2014 and now 2015. I'm not sure if management has changed, but I've noticed since his absence, there IS a change in quality customer service. You already get small portion sizes, but this is an issue that causes me to drop my otherwise rating from 5 to 4. I remember during visits home, the owner always asking me how college was going. Just super friendly and personable. Hopefully the cheerfulness and engagement via servers is improved.

Anyway, best hummus in Toledo. Hands down!

No stars if I could have. THE WORST "Mediterranean" ever. $11 for two tablespoons of meat??? And it's COLD. Awful awful awful. When I called and complained I was told the franchise dictates. I'm convinced Toledo has not a single good Mediterranean place around. Awful.

Aladdin's is a middle eastern chain in a city that has a wealth of local middle eastern options. Why waste your time and money? The food is adequate, but extremely small portions - nothing like you'd get at one of the other places. It's just disappointing. But if you have to eat there for whatever reason, the food still tastes solid, just not as good as other places, plus more expensive and smaller portions.

I love Mediterranean/Middle Eastern and up until now my favorite place to go is Beirut. I had been looking for a place that offered a more casual dining experience for Mediterranean food so I could enjoy it more often.
I decided to try Aladdins because I read the good reviews and when I drove by, it seemed to fit what I was looking for.

We stopped in for a late lunch and our waiter was friendly and joked around with us. (He might've been the owner based on other ppl's reviews.)

Sneaky:
I wanted to try the tabouli (my favorite dish) and the grape leaves (lboth isted as appetizers) to see how they compared to other places. When we ordered, the waiter asked if we wanted large or small orders of the appetizers. In the menu, there was only one price/size listed (which should've rang some bells) but I thought maybe the large would be more but still cheaper than ordering 2 of each appetizer. It turns out when we got our bill, we were charged for 2 of each appetizer!! So instead of asking if we wanted 2 orders of the tabouli & grape leaves, he tricked us by caling it a 'large' (which explains why it wasn't listed in the menu that way.) The waiter was deceivingly nice so I didn't expect him to trick us like that.
Also when we ordered, my friend was undecided on what to get so the waiter recommended the lamb which happened to be the most expensive thing the specialty menu. My friend decided to try it because the waiter recommended it. When it came out, the portion was so small! There wasn't much rice and there were probably only 5-6 small pieces of meat. The icing on the cake was that there was a hair in the sauce (to which the waiter didn't provide any compensation except more of the sauce.)

Food:
The food itself wasn't bad. It was average. In general, the dishes were a bit tartier/lemony than most other places I've tried. The tomatoes in the tabouli were a bit mushy which to me meant they wrent fresh, although the salad seemed fresh. The grape leaves were very skinny and didn't seem to have as much stuffing as other places and they had the same tartiness as pickles (or pickled olives) rather than lemon tart.
The falafel and rice were really good but once again the rice had a lemony tart to it. (for the record, I like tarty foods like pickles so I don't mean this in a bad way. I just wanted to state hat it's tartier than most other plces and was a bit overwhelming for even me,)

Portions vs Price
The meal portions were small. I can understand being stingy on the meat (ie lamb and chicken) but there was hardly any rice on our platters. Since it was lunchtime I expected lunch portions but I felt like I couldve eaten all the rice in a couple spoonfuls if I tried.
What I was most appalled about was the fact that our meal ended up being almost $70 for 3 people! It was not the casual lunch experience I was expecting and I did NOT feel that the portion or quality of food was worth that much money! Had we gotten our meal & appetizers for less than 10-15 each person, I would've felt it was worth it. But for as much as we paid, I would've much rather gotten Beirut where the dishes taste better and the portions are bigger!
(I realize the price was higher cause we got the grape leaves and tabouli but if we didn't get the appetizers, we would've left hungry because the portions were so small.)
Overall, as nice as the waiter/owner was, I probably won't go there again because for those prices, I prefer Beirut!

Over all this place feels like a stamp in an area full of paintings. Middle eastern food is amazing, especially in toledo. I had lamb and rice, the lamb was dry and lacking in flavor, the bright part of the lunch was the humus.

I came here for dinner last night with a girlfriend.

After much contemplation, I ordered on the Aladdin's Platter. When it came out, I was surprised at how tiny the portion size was. Well over half of my regular-sized dinner plate was salad. The other part of the plate had two small scoops of rice, and a pitiful portion of meat (2 pieces of chicken, 1 piece of kafta, and 3 pieces of beef - all of the pieces were small cubes). The taste was just okay.

The entree was $13.95. I can get over double the amount of food at Grape Leaf Diner for the same price, and it tastes better there too! Another nearby option is Grape Leaf Express, where I can get an generous portion of deliciousness for around $8.

I also shared a slice of Baklava Cheesecake with a girlfriend. The cheesecake portion was decent, but the baklava was a bit mushy. For over $6 a slice, I expected something fresher.

The waitress was friendly, but she did not do her job well. Even though the restaurant was not busy, she kind of forgot about our table. We waited a long time to order dessert, and ended up walking up to the case ourselves to order the dessert near the register.

I won't be back. There are much better options that are nearby.