2912 South Lamar, 447-4444
Mon-Fri, 9:30am-7pm;
Sat 9:30am-6pm; closed Sun.
At Phoenicia, there’s no place to sit and eat other than the astro-turfed front stoop, a shrewd move since it keeps people like me from hunkering down and feasting all day long. It’s actually a grocery store with edible treasures from around the world – Brazil, Cuba, Italy, Mexico – with the strongest influences being Lebanese and Greek. Shelves stocked with jars of quince preserves, exotic spices, and pomegranate soup make for an entertaining shopping trip, but the most immediate reasons to visit Phoenicia are the buckets of fresh olives (21 varieties ranging from $2.95-$4.99 per lb.) and the bakery and sandwich counters. At the pastry case, seize the opportunity to learn about the fragrantly spiced confections of another culture — nutty delights such as the turtle-shaped, sugar-dusted, pistachio-filled cookie called maamoul, or the tangy little honey-bomb treats that seem to be the Greek cousin of Mexican churros. Phoenicia bakes all bread and pastries on site and they’re locally renowned for their pocket bread, also available in groceries all over town.
Each of five specialty sandwiches comes in one of these 6″ diameter pockets and costs $2.85-$2.95. The falafel is ground chick peas and fava beans mixed with spices and then fried into steaming, munchkin-sized rounds. Rolled into a sandwich with lettuce and tomato and doused with a sesame sauce, falafel makes for a fine lunch, but I’d forgo a falafel and opt for a shawarma or gyro any day of the week. Respectively, these are the Lebanese and Greek versions of the same sandwich: Both are filled with thin strips of aromatic lamb and beef, lettuce, tomato, and onion curls, but the shawarma is dressed with the subtle tarator sesame sauce while the gyro has a tangy cucumber-dill yogurt sauce. The kafta is yet another pocket sandwich with a ground beef, parsley, and onion sausage and hummus. A roast chicken pocket with garlic mayonnaise is self-explanatory but it’s worth mentioning in that I can’t figure out how they make the chicken so moist and delicious.
I did suffer a fleeting moment of disappointment after realizing the fresh-baked “french bread” used for the deli sandwiches is pretty far off the mark from actual french bread, but once I took the magnitude and price of the sandwiches into consideration, I quickly recovered. There is simply no other place in town where you could get an 8″ prosciutto sub for $3.60. A giant roast beef sub costs $2.85. With sandwiches like this, there’s no reason to go to a chain sub shop ever again, and there’ll be even less of one when Phoenicia opens a satellite store on Burnet Road later this year. — Meredith Phillips
This article appears in April 25 • 1997 and April 25 • 1997 (Cover).