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We’ve always liked Mediterranean/Middle Eastern food so when we read a review of Combos Turkish Cafe and Bakery we put it on our to-try list. A hot and torpid Sunday afternoon was probably not the best time to dine there—it’s in the parking space of an apartment building. There’s no airconditioning.

The restaurant is charming, though, and there are plenty of electric fans. The meat is prepared on a grill on the side of the road. For starters we had hummus, which was excellent. Our main course was beef iskender—grilled meat on small squares of pita bread in a thin tomato sauce. Very tasty. One serving is good for two or three people.

Our sister had the beef shawarma, which looked like a soft taco with tomatoes. It was all right; we’re just not used to shawarma being soupy. Everything was swimming in the same thin tomato sauce.

For dessert we had baklava. We expected crunchy phyllo pastry with chopped nuts and honey; we got a soft, wet pastry with the consistency of mochi. It was delicious, though. We’d go back for the baklava and thick Turkish coffee; for the rest, maybe.

As the sign says “bakery” we asked the waiter where the baked goods were displayed. He said they didn’t have a counter, but we could order baguettes, Php35 each. The prices were a bit steep—Php500 for the beef iskender, Php300 for a shawarma, Php150 for two little squares of baklava, Php150 for an ice cream, Php75 for a coffee. True, Mediterranean/Middle Eastern food tends to be expensive, but their prices would probably have seemed more reasonable if we hadn’t spent the entire meal yearning for airconditioning.

Combos Turkish Cafe and Bakery is on Matilde Street in Poblacion, Makati. Coming from Rockwell Drive, turn right on Kalayaan Avenue then right again on the first corner (after Congo Grill).

Can anyone recommend a reasonably-priced Middle Eastern/Mediterranean restaurant? Besides Cafe Med at the mall, Hossein’s (expensive but reliable) and Behrouz (cheap but quality varies with location).

Watch Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, Alex Gibney’s (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; Taxi to the Dark Side) deeply disturbing documentary about how the church deals with sex abuse cases. Gibney points out that from 2001, every case of clerical sex abuse around the world was reported to the Grand Inquisitor (which had previously supervised the Inquisition). The Grand Inquisitor was Cardinal Ratzinger. The documentary premiered on television days before the papal abdication.

It sounds like a novel by Robert Ludlum or Dan Brown, and it’s supposed to. Any time something unexpected occurs in an institution as averse to change as the Roman Catholic Church, we bring out the conspiracy theories. Surely this cannot be as simple as the Vatican announcement that Benedict XVI was stepping down due to his age and declining strength. The fact that popes have resigned in the past—most recently 600 years ago—does not make it any less shocking. Nobody remembers what happened in 1415, but everyone knows that popes die in office.

Read our column at InterAksyon.com.

There are two reasons to watch Flight: the terrifying plane crash in the first half-hour, and the amazing performance by Denzel Washington throughout. Washington plays an alcoholic, the kind who deals with a hangover by having cocaine for breakfast. He’s managed to lie and charm his way through life, and it looks as if he’s going to do it again. On the day of the crash, he flies the plan while drunk and stoned. That’s not why the plane crashes; in fact his being drunk and stoned may have given him the derring-do to perform the stunt that saves nearly everyone on board. But his substance abuse turns up on the routine toxicology report, and the man is finally called to account for his life. Washington is infuriating and brilliant.

Nabokov, lepidopterist

Read Signs and Symbols by Vladimir Nabokov.

Have Mary Gaitskill read it to you at the New Yorker fiction podcast.

Having fully recovered from her cold, Saffy divides her time between hiding from the human with the medicine dropper and regaining the weight she lost.

Bottles for Nine Hypochondriacs by Kristyna Litten