(The following feature column by yours truly appeared in a recent edition of the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss. For this reason, please cite the Jackson Free Press when publishing this elsewhere.)
OXFORD, Miss. –
The great journalist, raconteur, and connoisseur of good food A.J. Liebling loved
to venture off the beaten tracks of New York and Paris to find little restaurants
and bistros overlooked by the culinary critics and trend-setters but where a man
with a taste for good dining could enjoy himself.
Liebling knew
such places—“lost Atlantises” he called them--often have a precarious
existence. “The small restaurant is evanescent,” he writes in his 1959 classic Between Meals. “Sometimes it has the
life span of a man, sometimes of a fruit fly.”
A more recent
writer, the former chef and current TV food and travel personality Anthony
Bourdain, had this to say about the perils of the restaurant business in his
own book Kitchen Confidential: “To
want to open a restaurant can be a strange and terrible affliction. What causes
such a destructive urge in so many otherwise sensible people? Why would anyone
want to pump their hard-earned cash down a hole that statistically, at least,
will almost surely prove dry?”
Maher Alqasas,
50, a native of the Mount of Olives in Palestine and longtime resident and
veteran restaurant owner here in Oxford, acknowledges the risks. “This is a
tough business. Imagine working 12 hours a day and having a smile on your face
for 12 hours, and to like what you do. The kitchen is a fireball, booming,
loud, and I have to be a part of that. What makes it worth it at the end of the
day in seeing the smile on their faces.”
He’s talking
about the smile on the faces of customers at his Middle Eastern-Mediterranean
restaurant Petra Cafe, open since February, a long, narrow stretch of a place
in the corner of the town’s famous Square that once housed Wiley’s shoe shop
and later Parrish’s bar. “Food is the moment of celebration,” says Alqasas, who
grew up in Qatar, “because when you are hungry you are willing to eat anything,
but if you know you are eating something good, it is a joy. You are nourishing
your body.”
The food at
Petra--falafel, kibbeh, hummus, labneh, dolmas, chicken shawerma, shish kabob,
gyros with tiziki sauce—isn’t exactly what you’d find on the tables of most
Southern homes. But it’s just as homemade and just as likely from old family
recipes, says Petra chef and Alqasas’ wife, Angela, also a native of Palestine.
“My customers come to my kitchen and tell me it’s the best falafel they’ve ever
had, customers from Chicago, Michigan,” she says with pride. “I love it. I
remember when I was a kid, my mom asked me to do the falafel. We used to help my
mom. I learned from my mother and my mother-in-law.”
The Alqasas—their
three children work at Petra, too--like the idea of a homey atmosphere, even
though home for them would be exotic to most Oxonians. The walls feature
paintings of street scenes and merchants from Old Egypt. The music is Turkish,
the carpet at the front door is Persian. “I’m trying to keep the Oxford look,
too, the old and new,” Maher Alqasas says. “This is an old building (a century
old, he estimates) but with fresh legs … new ceiling, new floor, new electrical,
new everything.”
Still, running a
successful restaurant on Oxford’s Square can require more than good food and
good atmosphere. Most of the two dozen or more restaurants and bars on or near
the Square also serve alcohol. They’re why the town’s thriving night life rivals
that of much larger cities. Petra allows brown-bagging but serves no alcohol.
Does it hurt
business? “It does,” Alqasas admits, “but eventually it is going to be known. Customers
can bring their own. It is worth the wait. It is all about the food.”
Alqasas is
Muslim. His religious faith is one reason he wants to avoid serving alcohol.
Another is the bar he once had in an earlier version of Petra a few blocks
away. “It made my life miserable as far as inventory, keeping kids working, no
stealing. … I don’t want to be a part of it.”
At least some of
his customers don’t mind. “It didn’t stop us,” said Ole Miss student Shelby
Herring, a 21-year-old hospitality management major from Houston, Texas, during
a recent meal there with her friend and fellow Ole Miss student Molly Thrush.
“I like Mediterranean food. I’m a vegetarian, so I like the falafel (fried
ground vegetables), the salads, the hummus. Back home, I’d go once a week to a
Middle Eastern or Mediterranean restaurant.”
Restaurants typically
take a couple years to turn a decent profit. Petra just suffered through the summer
doldrums that tend to hurt the bottom lines of most college town businesses.
Many tables remained empty during the summer evenings.
“I am a patient
person,” Alqasas says. However, he admits, he was more than ready for the fall
invasion of Ole Miss students.
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