Danger, Will Robinson!

There is a relatively new Middle-Eastern grill called Jaba at 2nd and Chestnut, right next to Eulogy and roughly catty-corner from Rotten Ralph's.

Stay away.

Phillyist should have taken the hint when we walked in and had to ask for the menus, and two grease-covered, finger-smeared sheets of paper that had obviously seen better days were shoved across the counter. But instead, we ordered lunch. Two falafel sandwiches, a beef kabob sandwich, a shawarma sandwich and a cup of clam chowder.

In the twenty-five or so minutes it took for our four sandwiches to get ready -- note that we were the only customers in the place, and all the ingredients seemed pre-prepared -- we had the time noticed a couple of disturbing things: In the rotisserie at the front of the counter, a rotating spit and attached chicken had obviously fallen, and were just sitting at the bottom of the rotisserie, covered in grease. On the counter behind the rotisserie, visible only if you bent down to examine the dubious-looking desserts in the display case further, were one-and-a-half dried-out, mostly-burnt chicken carcasses that had plainly been left roasting for way too long. Why they were sitting out unrefridgerated and not thrown out Phillyist isn't sure, but we're nervous about it. Very nervous.

Well, eventually we got the food and went back to the desks at our day job to eat. This is what we discovered: The "sandwiches" were really wraps. The wraps were made from thin, cheap flour tortillas stuffed with onions and lettuce well past its prime. "Falafel isn't usually green," a co-worker remarked. That's true, but it isn't usually foul-tasting, either, and this was both.

But the colour of the falafel doesn't bother Phillyist nearly as much as the fact that our "shawarma" was hunks of gristly, bony, undercooked mystery-meat. Chewy meat is one thing. A half-dozen chunks of unchewable gristle and tooth-chipping bone in a small wrap is another thing entirely.

The sandwiches were clearly a bust, we thought, but the soup was probably out of a can, and that had to be at least edible, right? Right? Hah! Instead of chowder, what Phillyist had paid $2.95 for was instead was a paper cup of greenish, rancid, stomach-turning chicken gravy. At least, we think it was chicken gravy. Nobody was really 100% sure of what it was, besides disgusting. Alternate theories included saucepan drippings or something that might once have been chicken soup back in the Carter administration. The fact that it had plainly turned bad was really the up-yours icing on the screw-you cake. Did they really think that we would mistake rancid chicken fat for clam chowder?

To say that we'll be giving this place a wide berth from now on is an understatement. We advise you to do the same.