Yalla Yalla

According to our sources (e.g. Friends we are staying with in Sweden), many restaurants in Sweden don’t make money on their lunch menu. Since most locals don’t eat out habitually, the lunch menu exists more to keep a restaurant on the public’s radar rather than as a means to make a profit. Thus, many lunch menus present great deals to entice eaters to return later for a more lucrative dinner out.
This is surely the case at Yalla Yalla. My husband and I were wondering around the Linné neighborhood, feeling peckish, when we noticed the lunch specials posted at this Mediterranean restaurant. For under ten bucks (65 kr), we got salad bar access, an entrée, coffee, and a cookie. It sounded good and we were hungry. We anticipated a quantity/​quality trade off, but boy were we wrong.
This meal was the intersection of excellent, cheap, and abundant. The salad bar included a wide variety of tasty pickled vegetables, cumin spiced potatoes, fried and plain pita, greek salad, olives, and assorted fresh vegetables. Our entrees (flank steak with potato purée and bernaise sauce for him; moussaka for me) were generously sized, delicious and artfully presented. For example, my husband’s flank steak arrived on a wooden plank, the purée piped elegantly around the edges and surrounding pools of fresh bernaise and vegetables. Everything was seasoned excellently and seemed made of high quality ingredients. For reals, this would have cost at least $ 20 in San Francisco, and thats without the salad bar and coffee/​pastry.
Highly recommended, particularly for those looking to eat well on a shoestring.