Pitaziki has a fast-casual, assembly-line setup that might remind you of some chain restaurants you already visit for lunch, but this New Haven spot on Temple Street serves Mediterranean favorites in fully customizable plates and sandwiches.
Pitaziki lays out the steps for you on its overhead menu. Pick the style of meal (pita, wrap, rice bowl or salad), choose a filling (chicken or steak shawarma, lamb, veggies, falafel or chicken kebab), then the toppings. Let’s call it the Chipotle of Mediterranean food.
That said, the options can be overwhelming, so we relied heavily on our servers’ advice. She suggested the shawafel wrap ($7.95, also available in a pita). Part shawarma, part falafel, these two favorites join forces to create one of Pitaziki’s most popular items. This precious love child combines the flavor of juicy, fire-roasted chicken with the crispy texture of falafel, plus all the toppings your little heart desires. The amount of food that goes into this wrap was nearly jaw-dropping — enough to rival a big burrito, but the wrap never ripped, it never fell apart.
Pitaziki’s customizable rice bowls start with yellow rice. Our server tells us the chicken kebab is a popular topping (she says the sauce pairs nicely with the rice, and who am I to argue?). From the toppings bar we watched as she hooked up my bowl with a smorgasbord of chickpeas, cucumbers, onions, pickled beets and white sauce ($8.45). The final product was flavorful, filling and, most important, photogenic. I Instagrammed immediately.
But when dining out, if you’re only in it for the Instagram, think carefully about what you order in your pita. We ordered two: one with lamb ($6.95) and a dessert pita made with Nutella ($4, plus an extra $2 to add fruit). The lamb pita looked like something out of a nightmare, a colorless monster with a white sauce oozing from its slit of a mouth. As for the Nutella pita, you know what a chocolate hazelnut spread can look like (feel free to visit ctnow.com/pitaziki to see it for yourself). Both were delicious, but my editor was deeply disturbed by my images. Neither was fit for print. Am I a failure of a photographer? Maybe if you order colorless food in a pita, it’s not meant to be photographed. Maybe you’re just supposed to freakin’ eat it (#socialcommentary).
But Pitaziki taught me a valuable lesson — to stop setting such unrealistic beauty standards for food. I feel guilty for basically body shaming food I enjoyed so much, but if that’s Pitaziki’s biggest problem, that’s not a bad one to have.
>>Pitaziki, 170 Temple St. in New Haven, is open Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 2 a.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. 203-773-5000, pitaziki.com.
