Mamoun's Falafel - October 23, 2010

There are occasionally food and places which are associated a particular memory, whether fond or hideous, or simply filed in a more easily retrievable folder in the many layers of the gray matter by the mysterious and uncontrollable brain - e.g. the scrambled eggs, scrambled in a cup of oil, with bitter melon in a town whose name you will not know if I mentioned it in China (you can guess which category this memory is filed under).  The first and the only time I had been to Mamoun's was many years ago when Mamoun's had only two rickety, grimy tables with benches (the ones they have now are nowhere near rickety and grimy as those back then) - which, I have only found out now from their website, can be called a "restaurant" - on a cold winter night in a two-seater Porsche convertible with four passengers.  Was it due to the lack of experience, that being my first shwarma, or the youthful shyness that wanted to think good of the sandwich, but the somewhat hazy warm memory, not unlike Mamoun's mint tea, had become one of the stories I would tell people at dinner parties when I ran out of things to say.