What is street food? Street food is good food that's not fancy. It's a great meal you can order quickly, yet without feeling like you're supposed to leave fast. It's food the locals usually know about--food that you don't feel strange eating by yourself, but are always glad to reveal to a special friend. Street food costs less than $10 per person. You order it at the counter, or at least pay for it there.
Eat-a-Pita
by Richard Risemberg
You could say that Eat-a-Pita's just a felafel stand on a noisy street corner, and nothing more, and you'd be half right. Because the food here's very very good, and the atmosphere, despite the noise of buses, cars, and trucks passing by just a sidewalk away on Los Angeles's Fairfax Avenue, the atmosphere is oddly soothing.
Eat-a-Pita has changed names three or four times since I went to the high school across the street, and changed owners perhaps more often, but the menu has evolved only very slowly, and with apparently a caring hand to guide it. Maybe it's just luck, for the owners have ranged from Israeli Jews to Palestinians and Iraqis, according to rumor, but the stand has sustained an aesthetic and culinary unity that the conflicts of its chain of Middle Eastern owners have never broken.
True, now there are kebabs and shawarma on the menu, and there weren't thirty years ago when I first went, and the patio nearly vanishes under an orderly tangle of vines and flowers, while now it's Arabic music rather than Israeli pop tunes that you hear while you eat, but the felafel is still nearly the best I've ever tasted in many years of pursuing that delicacy (in my youth going so far as to ride my motorcycle 100 miles to Santa Barbara for lunch at the Uncle Moustache felafel stand, once supreme but now, alas, long gone), the countergirl still turns around and makes the carrot or orange juices just seconds after taking your money, and the astonishingly rich french fries still invariably tempt you to eat them all though you know you can't possibly make room for so many--and you can't, but you do.
Sides such as fried zucchini caused a minor stir among habitués when they appeared a mere ten or twelve years ago but have become an accepted part of the menu now, and the tahini, that rich and savory sesame sauce essential to the Middle Eastern table, is still as good as it has been all along--excepting one unfortunate year or two when some passing owner watered it down. The whereabouts of his remains are unknown.
You stand in line with everyone from smart-mouthing high-schoolers to ancient Jewish ladies who may have been born before the turn of the last century, place your order at the window leading to the cramped and glaringly-lighted kitchen, take your number, and sit down to wait for the loudspeaker to crackle unintelligibly when your order is ready. Then you find a spot at the ornate iron tables under the pavilion and give yourself over to the pleasure of the feast.
It is not a place to hurry through a meal…not only is the food too good, but the company is too: shining young girls, garrulous old farts arguing over inconsequentialities that took place fifty years ago, ultra-cool young men with tahini dribbling from their nose-rings, dazed homeless souls huddled at the corner table, brash-voiced matrons taking a break from weekend shopping…anybody and everybody from anywhere and everywhere, and every one of them with an opinion…you feel like you're at the center of the world. If it's daytime, there will be sparrows flitting in and out among your feet, or perching on the back of your chair, watching for you to drop a crumb.
And nothing costs over ten bucks. All this, and world peace too…you gotta love the place.
Unfortunately Eat-a-Pita is now gone.
Text and photos by Richard Risemberg
