The Wisdom of Falafel

If you are currently drinking, or snorting a lot of cocaine, especially if you’re in your twenties, I understand. When you are young, life is about finding your future. You want to own the world and you want to own it now. Unless you’re a social media influencer or a unicorn app creator, owning anything is not likely to happen until much later. Doing really good drugs give you the sensation, at least mid-high, that despite reality, you are the center of the universe.

At this point in your life, you are a Superball, indestructible, always on the bounce. The idea that what you do now will destroy you later isn’t even an afterthought. Hell, if you’re in your twenties and you’re reading this, you’ve already probably dropped this essay and moved over to see who’s lip-syncing on TikTok. That’s the way it works.

Sure, maybe you eventually sober up or moderate, and in your resolve to live cleaner, you scamper away from your destructive youth in your thirties. Often, it doesn’t matter, because the other way it works is that your forties are basically like every slasher flick made.

You can intermittently fast, mainline avocado toast, and tell every carb that texts you “new phone, who dis?” but even if you run like Usain Bolt, Cancer or cardiovascular issues may pop up like Freddy or Michael Myers to tear your world apart.

You might get lucky. The other, other way life works is that chance always plays a role. Maybe you’re “The Final Girl”, the Laurie Strode or the Nancy Thompson, who somehow survives the killer, maybe even vanquishes them for now. But, as we know, you’re just setting up for the sequel, or the sequels after that, until the end comes.

In your forties, losing people you love starts to become a habit. I have been lucky that there have been only a few people that I’ve been very close to that have passed, but it’s happening.

As some of you know I’ve become obsessed with Formula 1. The only American I know who loved the sport prior to 2018 was my friend Steve. I only watched the documentary Drive to Survive on Netflix (which kindled my passion) because I remember Steve describing races to me in the same way I gushed about meals. I too now want to gush about motorsport with my friend, but Steve died in his sleep a few years ago, in his forties, months after his first child was born.

I have been writing so long that even people I’ve covered as a writer are dying. When I was a new scribe, I believed in Hunter S. Thompson immersion. I wasn’t just gonna call you and interview you over the phone. I needed to be in the dining room, or in the kitchen for the night, or in the case of profiling chef Paul Virant of Vie, going to Spence Farm to pick fresh produce with his team. 

While I believed in immersion, I was terrified of it. I don’t know any of these people. They didn’t know me. What if these chefs spotted the fact that I was just a stupid kid whose knowledge came from Food Network and cookbooks and not an actual life on the line like them? 

Jimmy McFarland, then a server at Vie (he would later become a chef and the GM at Vie and director of operations at Sparrow Coffee), spotted my nervousness on that visit to Spence Farm and welcomed me. He busted my chops like he busted the chops of his colleagues that day, chiding the meagre few pounds of ramps I’d picked relative to him.

Jimmy and I were driving back home with another Vie employee that they called “Cheney” as in Dick Cheney, because the guy looked like “some kind of young Republican”. By the end of the trip Jimmy started calling me “Clinton” as in Bill because it was clear that I was basically a bleeding heart. Jimmy, a guy who didn’t know me, but treated me like one of the crew anyway, passed away this September at 53.

Thankfully I’m still here to share their memories, but this last Monday I found myself confronting my own age-related deterioration at my annual appointment with a retina specialist. A few years ago, at a routine optometry visit, while deep in reverie over what kind of new sick frames I might get to make my baby blues really pop (vanity is real) the doctor’s mouth tightened as he looked at some digital scans of my eyes. 

He said something about what looked like a cotton wool patch and referred me to the retinal specialist. Cotton wool patch sounded like a cute website selling knockoff Uggs. I wasn’t that alarmed. Then the doctor said some other stuff about vascular deficiency and retinal leakage blah, blah, blah. I didn’t hear much of it because the only thing I could really focus on was how my doctor who was usually so affable that he could have been the dad in a Disney Channel sitcom had suddenly transformed into a pallbearer.

I went home and Googled, and I was immediately convinced that I was destined for blindness, but first the retinal specialist would have his Clockwork Orange ways with me by injecting needles directly into my eyeballs (this is a real treatment) to stave off macular degeneration.

Thankfully, none of this happened, and while there was a “spot”, it has since gone away. Though my retinal specialist assures me on these maintenance visits that I’m doing fine, it does feel like a mark of the beginning of the end. My doc also gleefully told me since I’ve been coming to him so long, he’s going to inject some dye into my veins next year and give me an ocular angiogram just to look deeper to make sure they’re not missing anything developing behind the scenes.

I am not yet even that old (which is what you say when you are getting older to make yourself feel better), but I feel the days growing shorter, the failures hitting harder, and the disappointments running deeper. What a drag it is getting old.

But, also, one of the benefits of aging is that I have mastered the art of finding life-affirming food. Just as I was about to begin 365 days of kvetching about a future angiogram, I popped back into my car, pulled up the news on my phone and found Nick Kindelsperger of the Chicago Tribune had written a piece about Daniel Sweis and his new spot Ragadan a falafel and hamburger concern. 

My most memorable meal in Paris wasn’t at Michelin three star L’Arpege. It was chowing down on freshly fried falafel in a black vinyl booth at L’ As du Falaffel.  Lenny Kravitz says it’s his favorite and if you’ve seen him lately, well, maybe the fountain of youth is to eat more falafel. But, anyway, since we’ve established earlier that we’re all busy aging, I will give you back some moments of your life and spare you the extended essay. Let’s just say I love me some fried chickpeas, or fava beans, bathed in cumin and coriander, so, I drove over to Ragadan.

I walked in and Sweis didn’t ask me what I wanted to order, but instead said, “Can I make you something?”. I was a new customer who may not have known what was great, but he knew what was, and he wanted to deliver it to me as a form of perfect hospitality.

Nick K. had recommended the falafel Ka’ak which subs out traditional pita for a sesame-studded bread loaf. I was going to go that way, until I spotted the stuffed falafel which was filled with sumac-caramelized onions. If I ever write a memoir it will absolutely be called “Smother Me In Caramelized Onions”. I ordered the stuffed falafel and Sweis said, “That is what I would have made you anyway.” I believe he was telling the truth, but even if he wasn’t, reasonable flattery too is a linchpin of great service.

While I waited, Sweis and I talked. This led to a discussion about his work for KDK restaurants as chef de cuisine at Marche, and executive chef at Gioco. I recounted in return how his boss KDK principal Jerry Kleiner once showed up in a tracksuit and ostrich boots and told me to hop in his Mercedes convertible for a tour of the south side the first time I wrote about him.

One upside of age is wisdom and experience, and while I was here for the food, it was also nice to have the knowledge to be able to have this communion with Sweis about important Chicago restaurant history. If there is no Marche, one of the pioneering restaurants of Randolph street, there is no foundation for Au Cheval, the Girl & the Goat, and Rosemary restaurants to thrive there today.

At Ragadan, as I bit into my falafel and appreciated the warm spices, the pucker of the sumac, the soft sweetness of the onion, and the crunch of the coriander-perfumed falafel, I recognized that this quality was not an accident.

Sweis is not old, but he is not young. This falafel is a culmination of his accumulated knowledge which includes “fancy” restaurant work for KDK and Gibson’s, Quartino, and Tesori. Sweis could have opened a high-end place, but he opted instead for a Chicago-style corner joint to deliver the delicious memories of his Jordanian and Oklahoman heritage to everyone.

I’m seeing this kind of restaurant more and more in Chicago at places like Hermosa where the Alinea-group vet Ethan Lim makes some of Chicago’s very best, and reasonably priced sandwiches informed by his Cambodian identity.

Why and how these incredible restaurants come about is certainly complex, but that they are borne of a long-term commitment to craft, a seeking of individual voice, and a commitment to making food accessible for many, is the kind of thing you rarely find in the capriciousness of your youth. To get here, you have to age a little. Maybe getting old ain’t that bad after all.

Ragadan is located at 4409 N. Broadway in Chicago