Belly up to Al-Amir in Arlington

On the outside, Al-Amir looks like a gracious Southern home with a veranda for sitting with a glass of tea. Inside, it’s all dark wood and deep red and glittery bars. Yes, bars, plural. Al-Amir is so large — it can seat 800 — that there are multiple bar areas as well a dance floor where belly dancers gyrate on weekend late nights.

Al-Amir hosts lots of large groups and special parties, but if you hit the restaurant and club at a time when there are no organized groups dining there, it can feel cavernous, and empty.

It’s a second branch of a restaurant that has long thrived in Addison, and the traditional Lebanese dishes that it serves are well-practiced.

We started our meal with an appetizer sampler ($16), featuring familiar dishes like hummus, baba ghanoush, stuffed grapes, falafel and one dish that we were not familiar with, kabis, which is a salad of pickled turnips and olives.

We liked that we could taste the sesame in the hummus. The pita bread we scooped it up with was puffy and so fresh from the oven that we almost burned our fingertips tearing off a piece. The baba ghanoush seemed homogenized and flat, especially in comparison with the outstanding hummus.

Moving on to the kabis, we were tickled pink by the bright pink turnip pickles, which were pretty, salty and vinegary all at the same time. On another night, we’d call it quits with the sampler plate, but we had a lot of tasting to go on this night.

The chicken kebab plate ($15) featured two skewers of chicken that looked like they had been marinated in a liquid that contained saffron. The chunks of chicken were larger than individual bite-sized and had attractive grill marks.

But the chicken was the start rather than the star of this pretty plate, which also offered up a grilled tomato, a grilled whole onion, a salad of sliced raw onions mixed with chopped parsley, a mound of rice and, unexpectedly, a peppery hot sauce for dipping.

The falafel sandwich ($8) was terrific, a generously sized rolled flatbread stuffed full of the spicy fried chickpea balls, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles and a creamy sauce.

Less satisfying were the two specialty dishes recommended by our server. Garlic salmon ($20) was served in a bowl with a mound of vegetables on the bottom and a salmon fillet on top. We were pleased that the butter sauce was lighter than we were expecting. A healthful dish perhaps, and the salmon was moist and flavorful, but the vegetables would have been better if they were crunchier, and the presentation was underwhelming.

Sharhat ($20), billed as lightly seasoned steak strip sauteed with garlic, is not a dish we would order again. The steak strips were dry and tough, and we couldn’t taste the garlic. Thankfully, there had been much that had gone right with this meal before the sharhat.

We are not hookah smokers, but if we were, we could have topped off our evening with a pipeful of flavored tobacco. Belly dancers, alas, only perform on weekend nights.

This story was originally published May 31, 2016 at 7:34 AM with the headline "Belly up to Al-Amir in Arlington."