Lola

Okay, got around to trying Lola last night, which is a much ballyhooed Greek restaurant from Tom Douglas. It's actually more like pan-Mediterranean. I wrote a review of this for egullet, the text of which is here for Seattleites.
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All four of us were a bit disappointed. Summary: little was really wrong, but little was really right. It was... okay.

We started with the spread sampler where we found quality to be mixed. We generally liked the creamy feta, the tsatsiki, and the eggplant, and we found we roasted red pepper and especially the carrot to be lackluster. The griddled pita was great -- too bad there wasn't nearly enough of it to go with the (not particularly generous) portions of spreads. Just charge me more and throw in more pita, for goodness sake (instead of making me order more later).

We moved on to Jackie's Greek salad, dolmades, pork kebobs with harissa and honey, and mushroom kebobs. I liked the meze more than I liked the kebobs. I thought the dolmades were particularly good -- the hint of coriander worked well. The much vaunted Greek salad was good, the feta topping it was creamy and delicious, and it looked beautiful. For $9 I would have liked a little more of it. The pork kebobs were okay, but the mushroom kebobs were very disappointing. The mushrooms were very dry and not very flavorful.

For our main meal we shared the mixed seafood tagine and the roast rabbit, complemented by the horta (escarole and chard) and the fried garlic potatoes. Everyone agreed that the potatoes were superb and the mixed seafood tagine was also very good -- excellent seafood simply prepared. The horta was okay but not very interesting. Our group was split on the rabbit, with one person really liking it and the rest of us disappointed. I thought the rabbit itself was very dry, but the broth it was in was light and flavorful.

At the behest of one of our party we tried some of their house wine that is apparently made especially for them. Both white and red were drinkable but unremarkable, so I don't have much more to say about the wine. The wine list looked reasonably interesting.

For dessert we shared the doughnuts and the goat's milk pie. Doughnuts were okay and goat's milk pie was wonderful (but again, at $7 a pop it would have been nice to have a little bit more).

We didn't have the service problems that everyone else is talking about, although we did have a very long gap between our meze/kebob course and our main course. The place was way too noisy, as everyone has said.

All in all I thought it was okay, but for the same money we could have had a truly fabulous meal at several other places around town. I'd go along on group expeditions in the future, but otherwise I don't plan on returning any time soon. There are too many better places to eat.
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This all makes me feel like an unspeakable yuppy.