Two Brothers
Start a meal here with a large shared salad of whole roasted red peppers and garlic, marinated in fresh, grassy extra virgin olive oil and dotted with generous squares of dry, salty feta ($5). Ask for the pillowy house-made pita—fluffy and chewy with the thickness of a catcher's mitt—to go along with it. Pasulj, a delicious traditional brown bean stew with an assortment of aromatics, is a rich and healthful starter of its own ($6.50), though their "curing" tomato soup ($3-5), I hate to say after all that, is kind of thin and unexciting.
The chevapi you see advertised in the window is a dish of juicy little grilled dolma-sized sausages, thick pita, ajvar, chopped onion, and sour cream—a steady and satisfying meal for one ($8-11). Sudzuka ($11.50), spicy beef and veal sausages, is a substantial plate presented the same way, with fries and salad. Goulash ($8-13.50), the Hungarian beef stew, was serviceable, but benefited greatly from a good stir of sour cream.
Pljeskavica ($11) is a massive, thin Serbian hamburger, maybe eight inches across, made with well-seasoned, finely ground beef, but at that price should probably include fries. The Balkan Sandwich ($8) is two of the excellent sudzuka sausages in half a pita with slaw, mayonnaise, cucumbers, and tomatoes—moist and massive, like a good gyro. Their gyros themselves ($6) are, by comparison, just the standard Kronos-type meat, and built on a generic pita. Lunchtime crêpes are tremendous, tender, and well filled, a surprising and unexpected hit.
The simplicity of this food, perhaps best exemplified by the grandmotherly burek, is a welcome mental change of gears in a landscape of complex sensory stimuli. Two Brothers provides hearty, defiantly unsexy, rustic home cooking in a friendly, casual environment—an interesting opportunity for a city where the diners are well disposed to rediscover ingredients for what they are, not how they can be fussed with.
-CHRIS ONSTAD