Koshary

Located at 200 South Elm Street in Downtown Greensboro, Koshary offers Egyptian and Mediterranean cuisine for lunch and dinner Monday through Saturday. There is no alcohol, but limited outdoor seating and catering are available.

Elm Street is practically Restaurant Row, but despite the competition, Koshary manages to  shine. A versatile menu with expertly prepared and seasoned offerings combine with a pleasant ambiance and hospitable service to make for an all-around winning experience.

Named for a somewhat eclectic Egyptian dish, Koshary appropriately incorporates some diverse influences. You’ll find the expected shawerma and kabobs here, but you can also get a gyro, burger, or rib-eye sandwich. For our initial visit, my companion and I split a mazza sampler and a full-size order of koshary with lamb. The sampler included hummus babaganoush, pickled vegetables, and eggplant ratatouille. All of the dips were tasty (though the hummus was a bit oily), and the accompanying pita was fresh and hot. The koshary (a multi-layered affair consisting of macaroni, rice, and lentils with tomato sauce and fried onions) had great tomato flavor, and the onions provided an unexpected but welcome crunch. The heavily herbed lamb was cooked to perfection: a still-juicy medium. Even a complimentary sample of hibiscus tea was cool and refreshing.

Koshary isn’t large, but it feels more spacious than the number of tables indicates. Like many Egyptian restaurants, it is adorned with colorful tapestries and decorative plates. Cliché or not, it makes for classy and comfortable surroundings.

Also like many Egyptian restaurants, Koshary can be pricy. Our appetizer sampler clocked in at $10, and the koshary was $14 ($9 without meat, $6 for a half-size portion). Come for dinner (ours was a lunch visit) and many dishes are a dollar more. This is hardly a shocker given the downtown location and the quality of the food, but some of the simpler fare (like a gyro or kebab) can be found for less elsewhere.

There are only a few minor annoyances that separate Koshary from excellence. For starters, the restrooms are not conveniently accessible: you have to venture into a building and down a hall to find them. Also, should you check in on Yelp during your visit, the Yelp app will provide a coupon that the restaurant itself will not recognize. Lastly, our server, though quite genial, was on his first day on the job and had to defer our questions to a colleague. Thankfully, responses still came quickly.

All told, Koshary offers great food made by people who seem to know – and care about – what they are doing, and that’s more that can be said for many businesses these days.

8.25/10

El Camino Real

Located at 4131-E Spring Garden Street in Greensboro, El Camino Real serves Mexican cuisine for lunch and dinner seven days a week. There is a full bar, and food and drink specials are available.

Call it the tyranny of abundance. Inundated as it is with quality Mexican eateries of various stripes, an establishment really has to outdo itself to stand out around here. El Camino Real has a lot going for it – solid food and reasonable prices – but it doesn’t do enough to gain separation from the competition.

Housed in an easily overlooked shopping strip, El Camino Real is small both inside and out: maybe eight tables and four booths in total. The casual cantina look won’t win style points, but it is comfortable and inviting. That, plus fast and friendly service, lets you forget the meagerness of the surroundings.

Fittingly for a place that translates to “The Royal Way,” El Camino Real wears its authenticity on its sleeve. While the familiar burritos, enchiladas, and fajitas fill the menu, you will also find lengua (beef tongue), mole, and other less Americanized offerings here. A recent Cutthroat Kitchen episode inspired a fish taco craving, so I decided to give them – and the al pastor (marinated pork) and chorizo – a try. The tacos came well-dressed with radish, cilantro, and lime. Of the three varieties sampled, the chorizo was far and away the tastiest: it offered a spicy, crumbly bite throughout. The tilapia in the fish taco was moist and adequately seasoned, but doesn’t reach the standard set by Los Gordos. The pastor had the right flavor profile (hint of pineapple) but was disappointingly dry.

Pricing here is wallet-friendly. Lunch specials run under $6, and many dinner entrees clock south of $10. Tacos are $1.50 each (more for fish or shrimp) regularly and are only a buck on Tuesdays. Whether you go for a combination or eat a la carte, it is easy to sample a lot here for relatively little green.

Were El Camino Real amid a less crowded field, it would likely be a local favorite. But it lacks the menu depth of El Kiosco, the inspiration of Los Gordos, and the taco wizardry of El Azteca or Crafted. As an also-ran, however, it is certainly better than most.

7.75/10

Snowpiercer

In the near future, a chemical released into the atmosphere to combat global warming plunges the planet into a deep freeze and kills most life on earth. The survivors live aboard the Snowpiercer, a state-of-the-art self-sustaining train that circles the earth. Poor passengers are crammed into the tail of the train and treated like second-class citizens while wealthy passengers live decadently in the forward cars, and the train’s brilliant designer, Wilford (Ed Harris), is worshipped as a god. Sick of the injustice, Curtis Everett (Chris Evans) leads his fellow tail passengers in a rebellion to capture the rest of the train, but his disruption of the status quo carries a terrible price.

Korean director Bong Joon-Ho’s English-language debut (a loose adaptation of an obscure French graphic novel) is a film that is both easy to be impressed by and easy to take to ask. An ambitious sci-fi allegory, it is at once tense, provocative, well-shot, solidly acted, overlong, ham-handed, and at times downright silly. But whether you love it or hate it, Snowpiercer at least makes an impression.

If nothing else, the film is beautifully shot and scored. From the industrial drudgery of the tail cars to the opulent refinement of the head, each section of the train has an appropriately distinct visual identity. Bong’s fight-scene choreography is as stylish as it is brutal, and there are aesthetic homages to everything from Bioshock to Terry Gilliam. Marco Beltrami’s score is hauntingly beautiful at times but foreboding and discordant when it needs to be.

Though characters here are developed to varying degrees (with varying success), the cast offers some laudatory performances. Evans previously established his action star credibility as Captain America, and here he showcases his range by playing Steve Rogers’ polar opposite. The beginning of the movie sees Curtis as a reluctant leader, bold but principled. When his friends fall by the wayside, however, he dirties his hands and doubles down on his resolve. His background-revealing breakdown toward the end makes for one of the film’s stronger moments. Korean stage vet Song Kang-Ho exudes surly mystique and detached cool as Curtis’ reluctant ally Minsu, a drug-addled security expert with his own agenda. Jamie Bell and Octavia Spencer are around for the ride, but they don’t get enough screen time to flesh out their characters. In opposition, the always-reliable Tilda Swinton seems to be having a blast doing a quasi-Margaret Thatcher impersonation as Wilford’s condescending minister. As the man himself, Harris is effective in a banality-of-evil sort of way, but his closing summation is disappointingly long-winded and contrived.

This speaks to one of the film’s chief flaws: the pacing is uneven and the runtime is padded. The first hour and a half or so are suspenseful and full of urgency, but the film then inexplicably tapers off and very nearly (pun intended) derails. The latter part of the film is so exposition-heavy that it is almost as if Bong expended all of his considerable visual creativity and couldn’t think of a better way to clue the audience in than simply having characters talk at length.

Though not to the same extent, Snowpiercer’s tone is inconsistent as well. This isn’t always a bad thing: Minsu’s sour observations and constant demands for drugs are genuinely amusing. On the other hand, having a cadre of armed goons stop fighting to yell “Happy New Year!” and having Curtis slip on a fish are head-shakers, to say the least. There are several other odd moments – including a segment in a classroom car – that feel off as well.

Sci-fi message movies (Elysium, After Earth, etc.) are bountiful, but movies of any genre that temper a message with a healthy dose of complexity and ambiguity are not. For that reason alone, Snowpiercer is worth your time. Look past the length and loquaciousness and enjoy the ride.

8/10