12.14.06
The Hungry Cabbie Eats The Outer Boroughs: Lucali’s
I’ve got a lot to say about pizza:
Take a 5 borough pizza tour with Famous Fat Dave
05.04.06
Hands Across The Shawarma
I’ve bridged the cultural divide between East and West, and all it took was meat on a stick. In today’s Not For Tourists Guidebook “On Our Radar” section, read my article about four of the juiciest shawarma joints in town.
And then, if you still haven’t gotten in the mood shawarma, read an article I wrote for Attache Magazine about a Kurdish shawarma stand in Madrid that would make Saddam Hussein feel like a schmuck in the “Published Food Writing” section of the Famous Fat Dave Five Borough Eating Tour On The Wheels of Steel website. Long live Kurdistan.
04.25.06
Here’s To Dahab
On a day when one of my favorite town’s in the world was bombed, I was in the mood for shawarma. I made a trip to the Middle East last year with an organization called Birthright Israel meant to send Jews from all over the world to their “homeland” for free. There at the Western Wall or the Dead Sea, we were supposed to find our true Jewish souls.
Things didn’t go exactly as planned. We dubbed our experience “Birthwrong Israel” after the trip degenerated into a debaucherous hash fest including one nice Jewish girl from New Jersey falling in love with a Palestinian and another getting caught on video in a menage a cinq with Israeli soldiers still strapped with their Uzis.
As for me, my Talmudic transgression began just after the official trip ended. Having noticed that the shawarma tasted progressively better the further south I travelled in the country, I left the group at Ben Gurion airport and made my way to the southern Israeli port of Eilat on my own. During my twenty four hour stint in that port town, I ate turkey shawarma at the same stand on three seperate occasions, and it tasted better each time. It was the best shawarma I’d had in Israel, so when I learned the stand was run by Israeli Arabs, I made up my mind to cross the border into Egypt’s Sinai peninsula.
After a few days wandering around on the beaches chatting with friendly Bedoin, I made my way to the serene tourist town of Dahab. It was snorkling heaven, scuba heaven, and, as expected, shawarma heaven. I spent two of the best weeks of my life there, spending my days in a scuba certifcation class, spending halcyon evenings chowing down on shawarma and gazing across the Red Sea at the Arabian desert’s craggy hills as they turned strawberry-red in the setting sun.
Before I got to the Sinai, massive bombings destroyed the Taba Hilton on the northern tip of the peninsula and a small resort north of Dahab, and since I left, more bombings devastated the famous resort of Sharm El Sheik on the southern tip of the peninsula. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when Lakshmi Singh informed me of the triple bombing in Dahab today as I discharged a passenger in East Harlem. I was surprised though. And so I felt like shawarma.
I’ve been told multiple times by my fares to eat at Zaytoon’s when I drop them off in Carroll Gardens. So today, when I heard the news, I took a break and headed down the FDR, across the Brooklyn Bridge, and onto Smith Street with my cab empty. The shawarma was therapeutic.
The friendly Palestinians at Zaytoon’s make their own pita in the window and their own hummus in the back. And their shawarma is sliced thick off spit, making Zaytoons’ cut the Katz Delicattesen of New York’s shawarma scene. Before the news from Dahab, I’d been in the mood for a slice, so I also ordered a sun-dried tomato “pitza.” I think mostly because the fresh-baked pita and breads are their forte, the pitza was good enough to make me forget about the Patsy’s of 118th Street slice on which I had planned.
The shawarma, even though I think it might be the best in the entire city, didn’t make me forget about Dahab.
Zaytoons, 283 Smith Street, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Check out http://www.famousfatdave.com for a chuckle or to book an eating tour
