Here’s a big family Mediterranean platter with five meats. The price? It’s $29.95
The oldest is still the best.
Before we knew about hummus or baba ghanoush, before fast-food restaurants sold a Greek salad, the Hedary family taught us all about Lebanese and Mediterranean food.
More than 40 years later, Marios Hedary is still teaching us new things at Byblos Mediterranean Restaurant.
He was 12 the first time his photo was in the Star-Telegram, along with Antoine and Leila Hedary’s original Fort Worth restaurant: Hedary’s Lebanese Pizza.
Now, Marios Hedary has faced up to the coronavirus pandemic that has taken away both his popular buffet and the downtown lunch crowd at Byblos, 1406 N. Main St.
So, he’s offering your own big Mediterranean buffet to take home.
For $29.95 at byblostx.com/feast, Byblos now offers the “Shareable Feast,” a combo dinner with five meats including chicken and beef kebabs, plus a giant sectional mezza tray with 11 different appetizers such as tabbouleh, hummus, stuffed eggplant and baba ghanoush.
It easily serves four people, one of the best bargains in this time of family dinner deals and takeout dining.
Other $29.95 family dinners, all with online ordering and contactless delivery, feature a choice of the family’s legendary lemon-garlic frarej roast chicken, chicken kebabs, gyros or falafel. The dinners also include baklava.
They’re survival-mode specials from a family that has known survival.
The Hedary family and nine children left Lebanon in 1976 to escape civil war, and they opened a restaurant between body shops on White Settlement Road.
“I realized my children were learning to shoot M-16 rifles,” Antoine Hedary was quoted as saying in that first Star-Telegram story in 1977, “so I got them out so they can learn better things.”
That story also advised readers that the way to eat Lebanese food was to shove the meat into “Arab bread” (pita) to “make a kind of Middle Eastern burrito.”
The story also quoted Antoine Hedary’s famous tale about how the original restaurant came to be named Hedary’s Lebanese Pizza.
“The phone company asked me how the phone is to be listed,” he was quoted as saying.
When he got to Fort Worth, he saw chain pizza restaurants everywhere.
“I answered quick,” he said. “I told them, ‘Lebanese ... Pizza.’ “
Hedary’s went ahead and served pizzas along with a dish the Star-Telegram described as “hoomis.”
Byblos, which Marios opened in 1992, offers more pizzas now than ever, along with a cheeseless lahmajun “Lebanese pizza.”
But Byblos is better known for the roast chicken ($15.95 dinner), stuffled-squash ablama ($13.50), lamb shank ($17.95) and charbroiled rib-eye steaks or lamb chops ($27).
I could tell business had been slow the last few weeks.
Every time I drove past on the way to the north side for a Tex-Mex patio lunch or dinner, the sign was bigger for “curbside pickup.”
Byblos also serves outdoors on two shaded patio tables by the parking lot door on North Commerce Street. (That’s actually the prettier entrance.)
Byblos is open for lunch and dinner weekdays and dinner Saturdays. The location is at North Main Street and East Central Avenue between downtown Fort Worth and the Stockyards; 817-625-9667, byblostx.com.
This story was originally published September 14, 2020 at 5:45 AM.
