With a long tradition of selling specialty ingredients for Mediterranean cuisine as well as pita bread baked on-site for over 50 years, this local Brookline grocery store added a cafe with a fresh Mediterranean menu in 2013. I highly recommend that customers try the cafe for a delicious meal at a reasonable price, as well as to taste some of the ingredients they may want to purchase in their subsequent shopping trip in the well-stocked store.
Introduction: Shopping with the Aid of a Fresh Mediterranean Menu
This place didn’t take as much searching or random luck as many of the restaurants I’ve found while traveling. Since I grew up in the South Hills of Pittsburgh a few miles from Pitaland in Brookline, it has long been a family favorite. Hummus was always a popular snack in my household growing up, so we would frequent Pitaland as the closest store to buy freshly made hummus and pita bread. Naturally, we would also try a few of the dishes off the cafe menu to look for inspiration to guide the rest of our shopping trip. Therefore, I had to venture in during my most recent visit to Pittsburgh during spring break in 2024 to see if the cafe’s food lived up to my fond memories.
Stuffed Grape Leaves
These grape leaves have a strong lemony flavor, with the savory flavor of the rice and grape leaf excellently balancing out the sourness of the generously applied lemon juice. The texture is a little softer than I would typically expect from grape leaves, leaving me to wonder whether they were canned or jarred as opposed to being cooked on site like the rest of the food from the cafe. The generous use of lemon juice may render the lemon slice obsolete, but the refreshing cucumber yogurt sauce flavored with dill is a welcome accompaniment. The menu offers either a meat or meatless option. We opted for the meatless choice, so our grape leaves were generously stuffed with rice.
Grilled Halloumi
This dish has changed the most out of any on the fresh Mediterranean menu since the last time I’ve dined at Pitaland. Previously, the halloumi cheese was grilled to produce a wonderfully crisp exterior but firm and squeaky interior. However, on my most recent trip, the halloumi was deep-fried instead, leaving a texture that was still crisp on the outside but creamier on the inside, lacking the unique squeakiness expected from halloumi. While this shift in the preparation method was disappointing, I’m holding out hope that it was a temporary adjustment, since the menu still describes the dish as “grilled halloumi.”
Lamb Burger
The lamb burger was always my favorite feature of the fresh Mediterranean menu at Pitaland’s cafe. While it has changed slightly since my last memory of it, the dish is still their best and absolutely justifies making the trip. One indication of the excellent execution of the burger was apparent from tasting a single leaf of arugula, which was attentively dressed with a salty and oily dressing. This dressing, as well as the crisp and sharply flavored pickled onions, excellently complemented the gamey flavor of a generously thick, medium-rare lamb burger. My only knock is that they were not as generous with the feta cheese as they had been in the past, with this burger featuring small feta crumbles that tended to get lost in the bolder flavors of the other ingredients, in contrast to their previous preference for a generous single block of feta. However, I would still recommend this burger as a testament to the cafe’s attention to detail and a complete change of pace from your typical hamburger.
Baklava
You absolutely must not leave Pitaland without taking home some of their sinfully delicious pistachio baklava. After traveling to Turkey in December and gaining an entirely new perspective on this Mediterranean dessert, I can still say that Pitaland’s version ranks as one of my favorites. This baklava doesn’t try to be overbearingly sweet and syrupy, and instead allows the flavor of the pistachio to shine, much like the best baklava I tried in Turkey at places like Hafiz Mustafa 1864. Pitaland’s baklava features a generously thick layer of crushed pistachio between crisp layers of filo dough. Carefully sweetened with the perfect amount of honey, this baklava is designed to be taken home for a later dessert after a large lunch, retaining a firm texture for hours.
Final Review of Pitaland
I was honestly a little disappointed that certain aspects of Pitaland’s cafe didn’t quite live up to my fond childhood memories. The new method of frying the halloumi was an unwelcome deviation, and the lamb burger could have used the generous serving of feta that was previously a highlight of the dish. However, this cafe still provides a great opportunity to sample multiple dishes from a fresh Mediterranean menu while doing your grocery shopping (I’d recommend leaving with some guava juice, pita bread, and hummus!). The prices are also reasonable for the quality and quantity of the food you’re receiving. At $7 for the grape leaves, $7, for the halloumi, $14 for the lamb burger, and $2.75 for the baklava, we had a full lunch for two with dessert to take home for $30.75. I was especially pleased with the price of the burger. This is the cheapest burger I’ve seen in months outside of a fast food restaurant, and the patty was generously portioned and expertly cooked. While the value for everything else was about what I would expect, the lamb burger is a total steal!