There are few things as insistent as cravings for particular foods. Whether it’s as rarefied as the desire for a madelein pastry in Marcel Proust’s epic multivolume novel Remembrance of Things Past or as down home as a hankering for grandma’s chicken soup or dad’s barbecue, the hunger for particular foods at odd moments is often hard to resist. So when I yearn for falafel, one of my favorite delicacies, I have no choice but to head for Tangiers International, a tiny, informal place that trumpets having “specialty foods for all people.”
Tangiers is located in a small and mundane, mid-twentieth century shopping plaza on a busy street corner at the far eastern edge of West Hartford, Connecticut. Whenever I step through the door,
Although it’s difficult to keep from ordering falafel every time, I’ve also enjoyed their hummus, gyros, lentil soup, chicken curry, tabouli salad, spinach pies, mujaddara, “heavenly” pastries, and other delights. Of course, anything I order is amped in flavor when washed down with a powerful demitasse of Turkish coffee.
Food is served at a short, seven stool, yellow Formica counter in the back while most of the store is given over to narrow aisles packed with groceries from distant lands that on any typical day can
If the dining counter is reminiscent of an old time drug store soda fountain, it’s no wonder. Going back a number of years, this space was occupied by the Concord Pharmacy, the kind of small corner apothecary that used to be found across America in the days before the big chains took over. The place has undergone relatively little change, and the pressed tin ceiling and tubular fluorescent lighting and linoleum tile floor are still intact. Where the groceries are now, there were once racks of magazines and newspapers and shelves of patent medicines, candies, and tobacco products.
Back in the day, it was a happening place and I’d stop in occasionally for cough drops or a greeting
Sometimes I find the building’s transformation as remarkable as the food, reflecting as it does fluctuating populations, neighborhoods, fashions and tastes. Tangiers is a harbinger of changes bringing the globe to local corners. It’s about the expansion of our sense of place, the growth of a world culture in spots once Yankee or mainline Eurocentric. A one-time white-bread and run-of-the-mill drug store has been reborn as an outpost of internationalism.
Eating at Tangiers reminds me that even the most pedestrian buildings are not completely inanimate, but retain and express the energy of their occupants, their habits and uses. Not merely defined by
