(A few times a week, I take a new book with me to lunch and give it a half an hour or so to grab my attention. Lunch Date is my judgment on that speed-dating experience.)

Who’s your date today? Muhajababes by Allegra Stratton.

Where’d you go? In the Bowl

What’d you eat? Fake-beef yakisoba ($7.95).

How was the food? It was really good. It’s super-spicy—they must’ve gotten quite a few complaints, because there are warnings posted everywhere about how spicy the food is—but it was a tasty, hot bowl of noodles. And I love the fake beef, which I believe is made from compressed mushroom stalks. I liked it better than Boom Noodle’s yakisoba.

What does your date say about itself? “Meet the new Middle East—young, sexy and devout.” The Times Literary Supplement says it “will disabuse you of your preconceptions of the Middle East forever.”

Is there a representative quote? Talking about Superstar, the Middle Eastern American Idol: “She explained that Musa liked to think, though he’d never say it, that Superstar is better than Jazeera. While al-Jazeera does get between 40 million and 50 million regular viewers, 15 million voted on the outcome of Superstar, ‘more Arabs than have ever cast ballots in a free election.’”

Will you two end up in bed together? Yes. The book feels a little slight so far, as though it would maybe be better off as a series of magazine articles, but writing about the youth in the Middle East is important, and something I haven’t read much about. A giant baby boom happened in the Middle East 20 or 30 years ago, and all those people are ultimately going to have a lot to do with what the world will look like. The writing is all right, and the title is really atrocious, but I think that I’ll stick with it.