Al Tarboush is the first Lebanese restaurant in the area and serves delicious meze and mains every day of the week.
The vegan and vegetarian choice is extensive even by usually high Middle Eastern restaurant standards. Veggie dishes are marked up as such and it's fairly easy to tell which are vegan. However they've accidentally left the "V" sign off two hot meze dishes, Foul Medammas and and the completely delicious Fatayer Sebanikh, which are both vegan too.
However, Al Tarboush seems to put a drop of yogurt on the tiny bit of salad that goes with the crisp fresh fulfil, so you could ask them to leave that off. As always with restaurants, explain your vegan needs well and politely to ensure no misunderstandings. We reckon this will become a popular vegan haunt so they will soon be very familiar with our needs.
There's a numbering system on the menu but the numbers seem different on line to on the restaurant menu so if ordering over the phone be sure to use the dish names.
If you have room for dessert, you can ask for the mixed Baclava without cream in. These sweet nutty little pasties are familiar to Eastern Mediterranean and Arab food, and come under Lebanese Sweets on the menu.
The service is charming so you are made to feel welcome and cared for. They are proud to display a "recommended by Thames Valley Veggies" sticker in their window.
Open 12 till 12 daily. Booking in advance is recommended for Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings.
We've recently met the owner and head chef, Sam. He used to run a hotel with 3 Michelin stars and on top of that loves cooking veggie food so much he sometimes eats veggie for a week at a time. In Summer, some of the ingredients are grown locally on Sam's allotment, so the parsley in your tabouleh will be as fresh as you can imagine.