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Update: This spot is sadly no longer open.

Hamburgers and ketchup, hot dogs and mustard. Many of us who grew up in the United States learned these food pairings early in life, at ballparks, backyard cookouts and birthday parties. In our case, we encountered falafel and tahini sometime later, probably at the urging of adventuresome schoolmates.

Ahmed Foda – or just “Foda” for short – serves his falafel, too, with the familiar ground-sesame twang of tahini. But at Foda Egyptian Sandwiches, his year-old Astoria food cart, the fritters are called tameya (tah-May-ah) and rely on fava beans rather than chickpeas. This is what distinguishes the Egyptian style of falafel from that of its Levantine neighbors.

When he hands us a sample — we’d come for a sandwich, but that would wait — we see that his tameya are flattened rather than ball-shaped, and encrusted with whole sesame seeds and dry coriander. Before we apply tahini, he hands us one more thing: a small purple pickled eggplant, just the right size to fit on the tameya’s flat top. They’re best eaten together, bite by bite, Foda instructs us. The “flavor of the eggplant really brings out the bean,” he says. Loosely interlacing his fingers, he adds, “We know what to eat with what.”

This brief lesson notwithstanding, Foda is continually in motion – on the day we first met, his baseball cap bore the motto “In Speed We Trust” – and constantly cooking. Tuesday, when he visits his butcher and grocer to restock his raw ingredients, is the exception. “I work seven days,” Foda tells us. “Your time is not for you.”

Foda, 40, lives with his wife and children in the Queens neighborhood of Rego Park. He grew up in Tanta, Egypt, or as he calls it, the “Queens of Cairo.” Foda tells us that he always “loved to cook at home.” At first this was for his mom and dad, then at Vaughn College (near LaGuardia Airport in Queens) – where he lived on his own while studying aeronautical engineering – for himself and his friends. Ultimately, however, engineering proved less alluring than cooking.

Speaking with us at the original location of his cart, on the boisterous and often crowded Little Egypt stretch of Steinway St., in Astoria, Foda says that after moving to the States in 2009, he began working the overnight shift at a bakery. Later that year he took a job at a street-food cart – he points to a corner, a half-block to the south – then signed on to a different cart, Farid Grill – he points the other way, just up the block. Today, Foda stations his cart on a much quieter side street nearby. Drive-up customers can actually park (rather than double-park) their cars; walk-up customers like us can enjoy the wide sidewalk and the spread of a nearby shade tree.

While enrolled at Vaughn, Foda was also working full time at Farid Grill. Daily receipts improved considerably, Foda tells us, during his tenure, and the grill has grown from a cart into a full-sized street-food truck. Perhaps Foda’s engineering mindset had something to do with it – hard work almost certainly did.

Foda later signed on with the Halal Guys, whose flagship cart in Midtown Manhattan is celebrated for its hefty platters of griddled meat with rice, and for its long lines of customers at all hours. He was the manager of that cart when Covid-19 arrived in New York, in early 2020, and Manhattan’s office towers were suddenly deserted. Like many of the city’s street-food vendors, the Halal Guys retained a core clientele of essential workers such as drivers for hire, but on a spring visit to the cart, we counted more pigeons than people.

Meanwhile, in Rego Park, Foda’s wife, Eman Attia, was running her own catering business. Although she had launched in February, just as the pandemic was settling in, she was still able to fulfill catering orders for weddings, baby showers and the like. Foda handled the deliveries.

He was still working for the Halal Guys, too, but he began considering an investment in a cart of his own in Queens that would spare him the commute into Manhattan. “Everything was going cheaper at the time,” Foda tells us. He had a cart designed and outfitted to his specifications – his engineering background came in handy, once again – and said his farewells to the Halal Guys in August 2020.

Foda Egyptian Sandwiches, which opened in Little Egypt that same month, provides an additional outlet – and a showcase for potential catering customers – for Eman Attia’s cooking, and it offers Foda the opportunity to focus on some cooking of his own.

Taking a moment away from the cooktop, Foda selects a loaf of fino so soft that a knife might flatten it; he scissors it open instead. Then, he  deposits liver and pan juices onto the chewy, absorbent inner surface of the bread.

For example, Eman Attia prepares the seasoned fava bean mixture that Foda later deep-fries as tameya, to be stuffed into pitas or served as finger food. She also stews fava beans for foul (pronounced “fool”) for 12 hours, enticing a texture and a depth of flavor that could never be attained at the cart alone. Foda applies the finishing touches to the foul, adding more ground spices, in moderation, and olive oil, generously.

We imagine that Eman Attia also has a hand in baking the oblong fino (Fee-no) bread that cradles our beef liver sandwich. Foda sautés the liver – in this, he can’t be rushed — with garlic, salt, black pepper, cumin, chile powder, green chile and lemon. Taking a moment away from the cooktop, he selects a loaf of fino so soft that a knife might flatten it; he scissors it open instead. Then Foda deposits both liver and pan juices onto the chewy, absorbent inner surface of the bread.

We think it’s seasoned perfectly, just as served. It needs nothing more except a napkin or two.

Dave Cook

Published on September 07, 2021

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