Offbeat Eats

Despite doing most of my growing up in Arizona, once I graduated from high school I pretty much immediately moved across the country for school, and haven’t lived there in almost 30 years. However, I still have a small stable of favorite restaurants from my years living there that I like to revisit on occasion. Many of those places I used to love are now gone (like Apache Junction’s The Mining Camp, which closed after a fire back in 2015), or some of even sadly morphed into poorer versions of themselves, but there’s a good number of places like The Chuck Box that manage to soldier on, even as the neighborhood around them changes (the Box, for example, is now dwarfed by high rise buildings built by ASU). Every once in a while it’s nice for me to do a followup on old favorites, revisiting them and make sure that they are staying in form. With that in mind, when I was passing through town on a recent business trip, meeting up with my friend Karla for another trip to Haji Baba was in order.

(Closed) Earlier this week, I had another of my periodic trips down to MIT to visit with collaborators, and, like usual, I used it as an opportunity to check out some additional restaurants, since Cambridge and Somerville have all sorts of great dining spots. This time, I was craving Persian food, particularly since rural NH is particularly lacking in Middle Eastern places. Looking over the offerings near MIT, I ended up picking Kolbeh of Kabob, across the street from Cambridge Hospital.

Well, after six days in Belgium, it was time to pack up our bags, head back over to Brussels’ Station Midi, and take the Eurostar back to England. Two hours later, we found ourselves back in Central London at St Pancras station, and a short tube ride down the Victoria line had us back in Pimlico. And, after that voyage, we were starting to get hungry, but several days of eating mussels, steaks, filet americain, and the like had us craving something at least a bit healthier, so we decided it was time for a trip down the street to get some falafel. Luckily, my brother lives off of Tachbrook Street, home of the Tachbrook Street Market. While Tachbrook Street has been a nice little street market for several years (longer than I’ve been coming to London), a few years ago the Westminster City Council did a substantial renovation: the road is now more or less permanently a street market and not a vehicular passage, utility hookups are provided for all the vendors (in neat little boxes that fold up out of the street), and most importantly, it has a lot more vendors and more regular hours. Monday through Saturday, 8 am through 6pm, the places is filled with vendors, most of them food vendors, ranging from grocers, to a coffee stand, to prepared food vendors, all selling from their stalls. And one of the more regular vendors is a Middle Eastern falafel joint, Veg As You Go.

For many years, Haji Baba’s in Tempe has been one of my go-to places for good Middle Eastern food in the Phoenix area. Indeed, it’s been one of the places on my hit list whenever I’m in the Phoenix area. Haji Baba’s isn’t exactly the best decorated place—it’s important to realize that the idea here is a market that sells food, and not a restaurant. As a result, the overall ambiance here is a bit lacking, it’s like eating in an office supply store. But you’re not coming here to enjoy the ambiance, you’re coming here to eat. And that’s where Haji Baba’s shines, with a solid menu of Middle Eastern delights, such as gyros, schawarma (shown here), hummus, tabouleh, grape leaves, olives, and such.

(Closed) here are several cuisines that are difficult for me to enjoy in rural NH, two of the most notable being Middle Eastern food and Vietnamese food. So whenever I’m travelling, I try to find good places to fill these gaps. Luckily, my September work travel ended up taking me to the western Detroit metro area, which is loaded with good Middle Eastern places. One of the more notable chains is La Shish (which I’ve been to before, although in a different location), which happened to have a location just down 6 Mile Road from my hotel.