I have just exited the little Lebanese boulangerie/pizza place tucked beneath the stairs on that street downtown (only one of many) that seems to be eternally under construction. The shop still has its salad bar on the left, the case of baklava and other desserts to the right, tucked under the stairs I always forget actually lead somewhere, but these have all gone unheeded and I have ordered what I always order, a za’atar tout garni (or, as often, “za’atar all-dressed”). Because that is how one does at Al Taib, or any of the Al Taib outlets, whose number seems to fluctuate between two and five at any given time. It cost me $3.25, which is a 62.5 percent increase over the price when I first moved to Montreal. But, you know, even that ain’t bad for a delicious sandwich. Once one accepts that the za’atar is no longer shockingly cheap, and makes peace with its entry into relative economic intelligibility within the culinary landscape of the downtown core (at the westernmost edge of the anachronistic, euphemistic Golden Square Mile), it should not be difficult to preserve one’s original enjoyment of the food. Although, eating it today, I began to think about how it is distinctly not a perfect food. The convention when writing about a delicious and regionally specific sandwich, I am willing to claim, is to make much fuss about the perfect balance that is struck by its ingredients—the yielding but toothsome quality of the bread, the freshness of the vegetables, the resolving power of the condiment. The sandwich as a work of art.
Now, I love za’atar, but I have enough associations—emotional, biographical, (sub)cultural—to make for its romanticization without resorting to such hackneyed adulation. What we call in passing the za’atar is a man’ousheh or Levantine flatbread spread with za’atar spice, a mixture of thyme, sumac, olive oil, and sesame seeds, rolled with vegetables. The za’atar ordered tout garni gives you lettuce, tomatoes, black and green olives, onion, hot peppers, fresh mint, and pickled turnips, and is a creature a little in excess of itself, a briny, potentially overwhelming clamour of tastes. Consider how four out of the eight toppings are pickled or otherwise preserved, and how the sumac of the za’atar itself adds a further astringent note. That the remaining ingredients that actually taste like anything include raw onions and mint leaves (mint: essential) does not make for a delicate or well-integrated whole.
Rather, the za’atar is bright and bold and gripping, spicy and tart and bitter all at once, the earthier elements hardly serving to rein in the wilder proclivities of the other ingredients. And I am totally okay with this, because it is awesome. I could (and sometimes do) ask for tahini or garlic sauce or even a falafel ball for bulk, but there is a certain esoteric solemnity to ordering it tout garni—one of the first of the idiotismes Québécoises with which I learned to pepper my French speech in order to gradually appear perplexingly doltish and allophonic (I used to get asked if I was Russian a lot), rather than merely an Anglo. It was many years before I bothered to learn that the za’atar owes its name to the spice blend, and that the sandwich itself may be assembled in many ways.
There is a little falafel shop on the Trubarjeva cesta in Ljubljana, just a ways down the street from the famous Zmajski bridge that is adorned at each end with a pair of fearsome copper dragons. We were taken there because the food is good and cheap, and, we were told, there is a woman who works the counter with whom everyone falls in love. There, I watched this woman make for me another kind of za’atar sandwich, so unlike that to which I had become accustomed: pita bread in lieu of manakish, dressed only with tomatoes and firm, salty, nigella-flecked nabulsi cheese, drizzled with olive oil, and only then dusted with za’atar. She had dark hair and pale, almost translucent skin; she probably loathed the fawning gazes of her clientele, and surely the dragons wagged their patinated tails when she crossed their bridge, but it was doomed to be, for me, an ersatz za’atar.
It is a comforting sandwich, the tout garni. And if ever I return to Montreal after a lengthy stint or a whole other life abroad to find all the Al Taibs shuttered and their particular take on the za’atar vanished, it will be with a more fully realized wistfulness that I look back on the summer nights and stoop-hangs of my early twenties, the beery 3:00 a.m. snackspeditions, and the warm, familiar heft of the za’atar, rolled up in its pink butcher paper. It is imbalanced, but it is imbalanced like we were imbalanced: a little too hot, a little too sour, a little too bitter. Manna for the emo-crusties. Everything louder than everything else. Forgive my sentimentality, I have a cold.