Dave Tillman has eaten at Meridian Kebab & Grill roughly forty times. He will tell you this unprompted. He is not an influencer. He is a retired electrician who lives six blocks away and has strong opinions about charred meat and the correct ratio of garlic to yogurt. He found the place because his daughter drove past it twice a week and kept saying someone should try it. He eventually did. That was three years ago.
Meridian Kebab & Grill sits on a stretch of East Fairview near the light at Locust Grove, sharing a strip with a nail salon and a tax preparer. There’s a hand-painted board in the window showing the lunch specials. The dining room seats maybe thirty people, and the owner, a soft-spoken man named Arman who came from Uzbekistan via Portland, runs nearly the whole operation himself with one or two family members helping on busy nights.
Dave will point out that Arman doesn’t take shortcuts on the bread. The flatbread that comes with every plate is made same-day — you can tell because it’s still slightly warm and tears apart in a way that vacuum-packed bread never does. If you arrive at dinner and the bread is not warm, Dave considers this a data point worth noting but not worth leaving over.
The menu is not long. There are kebabs — lamb, beef, chicken — cooked over real charcoal in a back kitchen you can smell when the door to the alley opens. There is a lamb stew that Arman will tell you takes most of the morning to make, and you believe him after the first spoonful. A simple chopped salad arrives before anything else and nobody charges you for it. Dave orders the lamb kebab every time. He has tried the chicken twice, out of principle, and returned to the lamb.
Lunch runs around twelve to fifteen dollars for a full plate. Dinner is a couple dollars more if you add the stew. They don’t have a liquor license. They do have a mango lassi that Dave describes as “very good, considering.” He means considering this is not a South Asian restaurant, which is accurate, but Arman makes it anyway because his regulars asked.
Arman is not much for conversation when he’s working the grill. He will nod when your food is right and say very little when it isn’t. Dave interprets this as professionalism. On slower Tuesday afternoons, Arman has been known to sit down at a corner table with tea and talk about Portland, Uzbekistan, and what it took to find a commercial kitchen he could afford in the Treasure Valley. That story, told without complaint or drama, is worth the trip on its own.
The place is not always consistent — Dave acknowledges that the chicken is sometimes drier than it should be and that parking on Fairview is genuinely unpleasant on weekend evenings. He does not consider either of these reasons to stop going. “You find the good ones and you stick with them,” he said, which is the most useful piece of Meridian dining advice I’ve heard all year.
Go for lunch on a weekday if you can. Bring cash as a backup. Eat the bread before it cools.
