Offbeat Eats

My next stop after our trip to Mount Rainier was a much-overdue trip to visit my parents in Arizona, and this trip was the first time in several years that my brother and I were able to visit at the same time. While the primary goal is just spending time helping out my parents, Arizona is also a great opportunity to experience one of my other great loves: a proper breakfast burrito. In particular, a machaca burrito, which are extremely rare in New England. While I normally go just a short drive to

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.

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.

Ted’s Hot Dogs is a relatively minor hot dog chain with locations around the greater Buffalo, NY area…. and one location waaaay over here in Tempe, AZ. The chain itself goes back to the 1920s, and apparently the son of the original Ted family relocated to Arizona in the early 1980s and opened a location here. I’d say that most Valley denizens are thankful, since Ted’s has been consistently topping the “Best Hot Dog” lists of all the local publications since they opened (they’ve got an entire wall plastered with New Times awards, for example). And I have to say the awards are well-deserved, I’ve been coming here since they opened (well, the visits are pretty sparse now that I’m no longer an area resident…), and I really like the hot dogs here…

Well, The Burger Project continues, this time with a visit to an old favorite. We all have our favorite burger haunts, and the Chuck Box is a favorite of mine, especially since it was one of the first, well, dives I ever went to for a burger. I’m sure that when it was built (which I don’t know when that was, the Box was a veteran burger joint when our family moved to Arizona in the early 80s), it was on the north side of Arizona State University, but as ASU has grown, it’s probably more accurate to say that it’s now kind of in the middle of ASU.