Review: Afghan Grill

Piktar admits to a saffron and coriander addiction, and he disburses it liberally throughout his food. You can see it in the jaundiced chunks of kebab chicken, juices flowing like spring water. Sabzi chalao, one of the grill's authentic Afghan dishes, is spinach boiled with coriander and simmered with scallions, garlic, dried lemon and dill. It's dark, deep and substantive, served with tomatoes and craggy strips of grilled lamb. It reeks of aromatized exotica.

There are salads too. Crispy shrimp, marinated in lime, garlic and ginger before it's wrapped in sheets of rice paper and pan-fried, crowns a heap of greens drizzled with yogurt dressing. Panir salad is a plated spread of feta cheese cubes, tomato wedges and chopped greens splashed with mint vinaigrette.

At lunch there is a buffet table, a row of steel chafing dishes with white napkins twined around the handles and blue Sterno tickling the bottoms. The lids are askew so that a small corner reveals the contents: meatballs, mattoo, aushak and saffron rice wafting that sweet raisin smell. There are drumsticks with the bulk of the meat scraped from the leg bone shaft, the rest of it pushed down to the knuckles so that all of the fat and skin and gristle bunch up with the meat scraps into dumbbell ends. Piktar says the meat was stripped because it was overcooked and dried. He left these remains to be picked over—an odd sort of buffet table shoddiness. The table ends in a plate of thick, gooey baklava.

But Piktar stakes his menu on kebabs. You see men stabbing the spike into their plates—spikes stacked tightly with meat and shriveled plum tomatoes, with green bell peppers with just the slightest bit of edge curled and charred, with onion shavings still juicy crisp even as they reek and taste of smoke. They work forks like plungers down the skewers to scrape them clean. Pikar got his two-months' rent's worth.

19177 Preston Road at the George Bush Turnpike, 972-818-0300. Open 11 a.m.-2 p.m. and 5-10 p.m. Monday-Friday, 12-10 p.m. Saturday, 12-9 p.m. Sunday. $$