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• vegan shawarma!

Kinneret has got few but great vegan dishes that I've never found anywhere else, like its shawarma plate--intriguingly-seasoned roast seitan, amid good baba ghanouj and hummus. Everything seems to come with their Israeli salad, a tangy and fresh little bowl of chopped cucumber, tomato, lemon juice, and olive oil. Also, I've enjoyed some tasty, greasy little cigar-shaped pastries filled with seitan "lamb" a few times. For a vegetarian, the place is wonderful: chicken-free matzoh ball soup, veg chicken caesar salad, many grilled vegetarian sandwiches, and all kinds of middle eastern items that rarely crop up in the U.S. (eggs fried into tomatoes, for example). The place also offers the pleasant feeling of being in another (Mediterranean) country, due to its sweet, amateur decor, its schmoozy, bustling Israeli owner, and the fact that it fills up with Orthodox families at lunch. My only reservation about Kinneret is that they seem to blow through servers quickly; I wonder how well they treat them.