Alex is very good about surprising me, so I generally don’t ask questions when he says he’ll take me out. Saturday night we went up to Capitol Hill and walked in off the Seattle street to find a belly dancer shimmying between low tables arranged in a semi-circle against the walls in a silk-bedecked dining space. Equally mesmerized by her movements, I missed my chance to pretend outrage at being taken to an establishment featuring scantily clad lady dancers.

We were seated, ordered drinks, and didn’t make a food choice until the dancer was done. For one song she took an ornamental sword, balanced it on her head, and continued to twitch her hips electrically. If I could move my hips like that, I’d set out to make civilizations fall. The hips that launched a thousand ships… Towards the end, she got one woman up to dance with her, to the obviously overwhelming embarassment of her teenage daughter, who blushed and watched in horror from her father’s side. Perhaps most impressive of all, she did it all in heels.

We chose our main entrees, and a succession of dishes arrived at the table for a five course meal. First the waitress brought out a large silver bowl with a latticed cover, and instructed us how to wash our hands as she poured water over them from a similarly ornate silver kettle.

The opening course was lentil soup, followed by a salad — shredded carrots, sliced cucumber and pickled beets. Utensils are provided if you ask, but we didn’t have any particular trouble eating with our fingers. With our hand-washing, we’d been provided with towels, which doubled as our napkins for the meal.

Next was a plate with a circle of filo dough sprinkled with cinnamon and powdered sugar. Inside was a mixture of chicken and almonds, sweet and delicious. By this time there was no urgent edge left to my hunger, the drink was kicking in, it was warm and comfortingly decorated, the semi-circular seating left everyone open for informal people-watching not usually available in restaurants, and I was starting to purr in a state of utter contentment.

For the main course I had a trio of kebabs — lamb, chicken and beef. It came on a plate with saffron rice and bell peppers in a tomato-ey sauce. Alex got Kefta, meatballs, something he recalled fondly from visiting Turkey. They gave us a basket of sweet, spiced bread to use as scoops. The lamb was particularly delicious, and I soon figured out a good method for eating rice with your fingers. Alex’s kefta was also tasty, although it came with two soft-cooked eggs on top, to his mild puzzlement. We shared and shared alike, and he wondered aloud whose food he will steal when he’s in China.

The desert was a slice of light cake with more powdered sugar and some strawberry sauce drizzled over it, accompanied with glasses of sweet mint tea. Alex tasted his with some trepidation, as he doesn’t generally approve of mint, but since it tasted mostly like sugar, it was okay.

About the time we finished eating, the belly dancer came back for another show. This time we watched our fellow diners as well. In one couple, the woman forced the man to move up to the seat by the wall, and took the cushioned seat on the floor, so he would be out of the dancer’s physical reach. (During the first song, she was using a scarf, and gleefully floating it over the heads of those closest to the center.) Across from us, a group of four couples also seemed somewhat uncomfortable with the show, making efforts to concentrate on their discussion, and not look away from their table tops. In her involve-the-audience song, though, the dancer did get one of the guys from this group up and attempting to shake his hips, to the amusement of all. We clapped for them both, and headed downtown, where we saw The Prestige, a well crafted film which had things at the end still to surprise me with, even though I thought I had most everything figured out.

When I looked up the restaurant, though, it seems not everyone finds it as impressive as I did. Maybe another time we’ll have to go to Marrakesh, in Belltown, instead.