When I was growing up in the 1970s and early ’80s, I never, not once, said to myself: “I’m in the mood for Middle Eastern food.”
I didn’t have the craving because I’d never tasted the stuff. We did not have Middle Eastern food in my neck of suburban Philadelphia back in those days.
Then I went to college, tried falafel and shawarma and hummus, and have routinely been “in the mood” ever since.
For most of the past 25 years of eating Middle Eastern, satisfying the mood required little in the way of nuance. Give me some fried-chickpea patties, give me a platter of thin-sliced meat, give me a small bowl of smoky, creamy eggplant, and I’m good.
But now I have Arabesque in Boulder, a slip of a place owned by a Lebanese couple.
Suddenly, the mood is more complicated.
Now I want Arabesque’s homemade pita, for one thing: pillowy, fluffy, cloudlike discs of baked wheat. I want their hand-stuffed grape leaves (the leaves themselves are not briny and fragile like those from cans; they seem more like something plucked from a grape arbor and just softened). I want the homemade cheese, the falafel that did not come from a box, the shavings of flaky, soft chicken meat in the shawarma.
The mood will involve the desire to sit in a Middle Eastern restaurant and hear the owners speak French with a pair of gamine Parisians with interesting shoes and angular haircuts — again.
I think I’m asking for too much.
Fortunately, I have Arabesque.
The next time the mood strikes, I know where to go. But I’ll have to plan. If I want their food for dinner, I’ll have to do takeout. They close at 4.
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
ARABESQUE.
Middle Eastern. 1634 Walnut St., Boulder, 720-242-8623. Open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday; closed Sunday. arabesqueboulder.com
