Sofra

LOCATION: 1 Belmont Street Cambridge, MA
TYPE OF FOOD: Mediterranean (I guess)
REVIEW: Sometimes you just have to wonder how a restaurant gets its location. Some restaurants have a nice location, with no restaurants or no restaurants good enough for competition. Some restaurants have a nice area around it, which is also good. Why do I bring this up, you ask? Well, the area around Sofra is not that beautiful and I passed by three of the tourist-trap "family pizza places". Eventually I snapped out of my thoughts and entered.

The second I entered the place I saw what I wanted. A sign for "Soup of the Day" had lamb stew. There was no deliberation, no one arm punching the other arm like they are having an argument, no tug-of-war between two fictional characters in my mind. Just me saying, "I would like the lamb stew, please." For my drink I had mint tea.

The tea tasted like minty milk. It had the same exact quality of milk. After struggling through the first few sips, and ten-twenty minutes, I received the food. The stew came with sesame crackers. The stew was fine. Just fine. In the middle. It wasn't good, yet wasn't horrible. In fact, the crackers were better than the stew. I didn't even finish my stew. I put my dishes away (still effected by the "tea"), took a catering menu (the closest they had to a takeout menu, oh well, better than Steve's), and exited.

SERVICE: This is one of the places in which only 1% of your time is spend with the service. The service is nice and friendly, but that's just the counter service. The food service are the people who call out your order. And they do it by number, like at a 95% put together grocery store deli. And they have accents. Thick accents. My number sounded like three, when it wasn't three. In fact, I hardly differed it from the other numbers.

ATMOSPHERE: At first glance the place would look comfortable. Well, it isn't. Odds are, you will have to sit on one of the IKEA stools that they have. The stools are not comfortable. And you will have to sit close to the trash-can like tables that they have in order to prevent food from falling on your lap. Which means you will be cramped close. Quite close.

PRICE: Cheap. Very, very, very cheap. My stew was only 6 dollars. In fact, you could probably feed you and another person on twenty dollars. Maybe even you and two other people. Three other people? Um... twenty seven dollars. Probably.

RATING: People told me good things about Sofra. Very good things. For me, my experience was not good. However for twenty dollars, you could feed your friends. But as pessimists say all the time, the negatives always win. Then why would they be pessimists? Sofra gets a three out of five.