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The Pita Inn January 3, 2003 - Hot on the heels of a holiday season filled with high calorie chow-downs, our Restaurant Critic James Ward is here to review a suburban restaurant that offers healthy food with taste and style!

Healthy food with taste & style and for under 5 bucks - that's the pitch of the wildly popular Pita Inn in Skokie. Call the cooking Mediterranean or Middle-Eastern, the place brings many different people together at their good table. And that's what a restaurant should do!

Dempster Street in Skokie is mix of edibilia ... a mini-mall of fast food and ethnic fare including Greek and Dairy Kosher at Slice of Life. It's where the Mid-East meets the Midwest.

Certainly the most popular place on the strip is the Pita Inn, the pride and joy of owner Falah Tabahi. Newly redone & decked out, it's been a Dempster Street destination for 20 years.

Now with 80 seats, The Pita Inn serves a thousand fiercely loyal customers a day: eat-in or pack-it-up to-go. What a crazy take-out scene!

Why the loyalty? These good people, polishing off generous plates of hummos and baba gahannoug, come several times a week ... as do many others because the Mid- Eastern food. From the popular lentil soup and the colorful salads to the thinly sliced shawarma and that sticky sweet dessert, baklava - all of it - is good & fast & cheap. And nicely turned out as is this falafel: a twice ground mix of green pepper, onions, garlic, parsley, cumin and coriander which is then deep-fried and tucked into pita bread as a sandwich or served as a vegetarian entree.

Other favorites of mine - grilled chicken tenders with rice pilaf and the verdant tabouleh salad. And the price is right!

Everything at the Pita Inn is inexpensive but the weekday lunch special is the biggest best buy ... for only $3.95 you get shawarma, falafel, rice salad, two kinds of kababs - shish and kefta. And of course, that good pita bread itself which you can see being made fresh in the Bakery just west of the restaurant.

Also, don't miss the Pita Inn Grocery next door with Middle Eastern goodies ranging from a variety of extra virgins and big bags of basmati rice to stuffed grape leaves & more in the deli.

The Pita Inn is at 3910 West Dempster in Skokie. Call 847-677-0211. Average tab, under five dollars.

And the Pita Inn gets a Bread rating of 7 for food; and a 7 for Circuses! By the way, there's another Pita Inn on South Elmhurst Road in Wheeling; and a third one will open soon on Milwaukee Avenue in Glenview. Who says you can have too much of a good thing?

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Between the intoxicating smells and the out-the-door line of patient devotees, I had a good feeling about Pita Inn from the get-go, excitedly planning my next visit before my first bite. The original Skokie outpost has been going strong since 1982 and, having lived in the North 'burbs my entire life, I'm embarrassed (and really sad) to say that, until last week, I had never been here. I started making up for lost time with a much-need Mediterranean feast of lentil soup, chicken shawarma, fattoush salad and some of the best hummus I've had in quite a while, served with the eatery's famous namesake: fresh baked pita bread, prepared on site daily.

Good luck finding more bang for your buck anywhere else, as even fast food often doesn't come this cheap. Aside from unbelievably low prices, Pita Inn is adored for its freshness, cleanliness and, most importantly, to-die-for lunch and dinner.

The vegetarian combination plate, one of the pricier items on the menu at $6.95, comes with (brace yourself) three falafel, three stuffed grape leaves, hummus, baba ghannoug, Jerusalem salad and tabouleh salad (pita too, of course). For the meat eaters, there's shish kabob, lamb kabob and beef or chicken shawarma. And you can't go wrong with one of the ever-popular pita pocket sandwiches (say that five times fast), which range from $2.75-$3.95. Monday through Friday between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., you can get the business lunch special: a combination of shish kabob, kifta kabob, shawarma and falafel served with rice pilaf, salad and pita for an astounding $3.95. Seriously.

Break the bank with a 95-cent piece of baklava for dessert. If you're not too full to move, head to the market next door and stock up on Mediterranean favorites like feta, olive oil, sesame candy and, of course, pita.

Reviewed By: Natalie Goldstein