Recently, the Festival located on Route 24 at Bel Air South Parkway has added new restaurants, showcasing international cuisine. India Garden, obviously, offers Indian cooking. SaiGon Pearl gives a taste of Vietnam. Pita Pit features Mediterranean and Middle Eastern inspired food. Kobe Buffet serves Asian meats. With all these new and exciting places to eat, I decided to investigate myself.

Saying “Indian food” is a generalization, because Indian cuisine varies, depending on where you are in India. India Garden’s mission is to give Bel Air an assortment of authentic dishes from the vast country. Typically, Indian food includes lentils, various beans, basmati rice, and spices like ginger and curry leaves. India Garden has a plethora of options within the Indian food discipline. Being a vegan, it can be difficult to find places to eat out. Most restaurants only have a couple of vegetarian options, but India Garden has an entire page in their menu. This is because India’s popular religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, encourage followers to eat a vegetarian diet.  When you order, the server will ask you how spicy you want your food. So if you don’t like your food searing your mouth—or if you do—you can create the perfect dish.

Vietnamese food is all about balance. It’s more art than anything. Typically, food is cooked with a “yin yang” balance. For example, if something is hot in the dish (ginger) it is balanced out with a cool food (fish). Freshness is key in most dishes; meats are cooked briefly and vegetables are usually eaten raw. The SaiGon Pearl features a lot of seafood, noodles, and stir fries. They also have a page in their menu dedicated to our tofu-eating vegetarian friends. Here you can find a lot of unusual foods you couldn’t get anywhere else, like deep fried bananas and Vietnamese yogurt.

The Mediterranean and Middle East come together at Pita Pit. Pita Pit offers a more wholesome place to eat out, seeing as the Mediterranean diet has been praised for its health benefits. Typically, this diet includes eating a lot of legumes, vegetables, and olive oil. Middle Eastern cuisine features the use of chickpeas and pitas. Putting the two together makes for a winning combination. Pita Pit’s menu is simple. Offering three breakfast pitas, three vegetarian pitas, and three meat pitas. If you’re feeling creative, you can always customize your own! Customers can chose from different sauces (like hummus) and toppings (like fresh veggies). Pita Pit serves falafel, which is ground chickpeas rolled into a ball and fried, which is my personal favorite.

The most recent addition to the festival is Kobe Buffet. Kobe Buffet showcases an array of Asian flavors, like Korean. All the restaurants I mentioned before are heavily vegetarian, but if you’re a carnivore, Kobe is the place for you. Pork, beef, seafood, and other types of meat are served buffet style. Chefs cook on open grills, so you can watch how everything is made, and maybe even replicate the delicious dishes at home!

I’m pleasantly surprised by the diversity of cuisines the Bel Air Festival offers now. It gives me more options than just “Mexican” food at Chipotle. Also, writing this article gave me an excuse to eat delicious food, and what’s better than that?