This past week, I’ve been taking some time to look at all of my food delivery apps, such as DoorDash and Uber Eats, as a type of precaution in case I would ever have to quarantine myself. Recently, when I opened up DoorDash, I noticed a restaurant in Midtown that I had never heard of before. It was a Mediterranean restaurant called Oozie, and it had really good reviews. I’m always down for some good Mediterranean food, so I decided to place a pickup order to check it out.
Right away, one thing that stood out to me about this restaurant was how hidden it was. I had to go through some sort of office building, past a dentist’s office and then around a corner to find it. Luckily, there were plenty of helpful instructions on Yelp for how to get there, but without them I probably would’ve been pretty lost.
The atmosphere of the restaurant was pretty meh.
There weren’t any sort of decorations or any sort of interior design. It was pretty much a lot of gray and beige. It felt kind of cold and awkward. But as soon as I walked in to pick up my order, the cooks greeted me and told me that they had been keeping my order warm near the stove. It was nice to interact with the friendly staff, and it took some of the edge off the restaurant’s dull atmosphere.
When it came to the food, I would give it a solid six stars out of ten. It was edible, but it didn’t blow me away. I appreciated how on the menu (or at least the DoorDash version of the menu) they had a section that was dedicated to vegetarian meals. I ended up getting a wrap with lentils, rice, caramelized onions, vegetables and a vinaigrette along with a side of hummus. At times, the temperature of the wrap kind of threw me off because the vegetables were somewhat cold whereas the rest of the wrap was warm. Overall, the wrap was okay. It had seasoning, and I finished the entire thing, but it didn’t blow my socks off. It seemed pretty healthy though, which is a positive.
As for the hummus, it came with some pita slices for dipping. However, their pita to hummus ratio was way off. There were six tiny, thin pita triangles along with a relatively large bowl of hummus. I finished off the tiny little pita pieces in less than two minutes, and then I was left with the awkward dilemma of not knowing what to do with the rest of my hummus. Needless to say, if I were to come here with friends, I would probably not get the hummus and expect to share it with everyone. But at least I will say that the hummus tasted pretty good.
Overall, I would describe Oozie as okay. The food here was solid, but if I personally had to pick a Mediterranean place to eat at, I would probably pick Basil instead. The food quality here is about the same as it is at Basil, but Basil has great tea service and a good dessert collection, which tips the scales for me.
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