MK Bistro offers daily brunch and dinner in Brookside

Medhi Khezri, owner of Tulsa's two Ti Amo Italian restaurants since 1991, recently purchased two longtime Brookside restaurants: Cafe Ol and Ol Vine Fresh Grill.

It wasn't something I planned to do, Khezri said. I know David Bryant, the owner of the Rotary Club of Tulsa, and at a meeting he asked me, somewhat out of the blue, if I would be interested in buying a few restaurants.

Khezri said he was very interested in Café Ol because the restaurant was one of his and his wife's favorite restaurants.

“We liked that it wasn’t a typical Mexican restaurant, but more of a Southwestern cuisine,” he said. I was interested because I had the idea of ​​trying to bring it down to a level close to what I remembered at the beginning.

As for the other restaurant, Khezri saw it as an opportunity to start more or less from scratch and develop a new concept.

The idea was to create an American bistro, with some Mediterranean and European accents, he said. We also wanted it to be a gathering place for the neighborhood, which is why we decided to be open every day for brunch and offer two happy hours.

The first happy hour is from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., with half-price appetizers and a selection of wines for $4 a glass. The second is at 7 p.m., when the house burger costs $5.

The space also benefits from two distinct patios, one at the front of the restaurant, facing Peoria, and the other, larger, which opens onto the parking lot of Cornerstone Stores, the small Brookside shopping complex including MK Bistro is one. part.

And, just as she was one of the reasons he bought Café Ol, Khezris' wife is an integral part of MK Bistro.

Many people know her as Mrs. K, and that's what the initials of the restaurant's name stand for, Khezri said.

Colton Selberg came from the Tulsa Country Club to serve as executive chef at Ti Amo, MK Bistro, and Café Ol (which will be reviewed later).

Selberg said he started out pursuing engineering, but realized pretty early in the process that it wasn't the path for me. My parents, my mother in particular, encouraged me when I told them I wanted to go to culinary school. They saw the joy I felt when I prepared family dinners.

One of the dishes Selberg brought to MK Bistro was his mother's pancake recipe, which appears on the brunch menu in several forms.

I remember her making me pancakes when I was a kid, and no one makes better pancakes than your mom, Selberg said. I fiddled with things a bit to make it suitable for a commercial kitchen, but otherwise this is her recipe.

My partner considers herself a pancake connoisseur, so I wasn't surprised that when we recently visited MK Bistro for brunch, she more or less instantly opted for the cakes and eggs ($14).

Two buttermilk pancakes come with two eggs, bacon or sausage and a choice of toast, a small salad or breakfast potatoes. Our server asked about the side and protein, but didn't ask how the eggs should be prepared. My companion would have preferred eggs rather than medium eggs, but he was served scrambled eggs instead. She got the potatoes and bacon as requested.

I chose the Build Your Own Omelette option ($12). Ten items could be added to meats, cheeses, vegetables and we selected Canadian bacon, mushrooms and shredded cheese, which turned out to be cheddar, as well as potatoes on the side.

We also ordered house-made sausage rolls ($12), which were served with a salad topped with what we guessed was the lemon-garlic vinaigrette.

The pancakes were excellent, light and fluffy with a slight hint of crispiness around the edge. They came with a lemon-maple syrup which brightened them up considerably.

The omelette was a little overdone for my taste, but nicely studded with slices of fresh mushrooms and shards of Canadian bacon; the shreds of cheese had been sprinkled on top of the finished dish. The breakfast potatoes were lightly fried pieces of skinned potato with a few sprigs of shallot and large chunks of green pepper.

The sausage dough was tough on the underside, making it a little difficult to cut, but once the dough was finished, the sausage itself was well seasoned; the spicy grainy mustard that accompanied both sausages added a nice heat.

We returned a few days later for dinner, this time ordering the Kefta Skewers ($14) as an appetizer, as well as two dishes that we later learned were holdovers from the Ol Vine menu: the chicken piccata ($24) and the Beef Stroganoff ($29). ).

Kofta is a mixture of lamb and ground beef, usually seasoned with parsley, onion, garlic and spices which give it a flavor slightly reminiscent of gyro meat. Three cylinders of meat on sticks were grilled and topped with feta cheese and served with a cup of tzatziki sauce and a portion of tabouli.

It was certainly the most successful dish of the evening. The flavorful meat was complemented by the salty feta and tangy sauce. The tabouli consisted of fine-grained bulgar sprinkled with finely chopped parsley and chopped tomatoes in a vinaigrette that balanced sweetness and acidity in perfect proportions.

Both the Stroganoff and the Piccata were far from satisfactory. The breading on the thin chicken breast of the piccata was burnt, but it came off easily. The angel hair pasta was cooked well, although the flavor from the promised lemon-garlic sauce was hard to come by.

The stroganoff included pasta trecce dellorto, a kind of open tube-shaped noodle, with pieces of steak and mushrooms, topped with a little sour cream and parsley. It was an intensely brown dish with a somewhat unique taste.

We concluded the menu with another holdover, the Lemon Blueberry Gooey Cake ($11) accompanied by a big scoop of good vanilla ice cream. We probably wouldn't have described the cake as gooey, but it was studded with enough blueberries that you could get at least one in every bite, and the buttery cake had a slight lemony flavor.