On Friday, Bellal and Meckey Chater, brothers and co-owners of Mamoun’s Falafel Restaurant, put notices in the windows of the restaurant’s Main Street storefront announcing its closing.
“We’ve tried a lot of different avenues to keep it open,” said Jim Gordeuk, a representative of the restaurant chain. “If we had some sort of way to have kept it from closing, we would have done so.”
The sudden closing comes approximately five and a half years after the restaurant’s opening on May 9, 1999. According to Gordeuk, the Chater family’s other businesses outside of the restaurant were major factors in the brothers’ decision to close Mamoun’s.
“We have a number of unrelated businesses, and we were not expecting [one of them] to grow at the rate that it did,” Gordeuk said. “[The growing businesses] started to take [family members] away from the restaurants.”
Because details regarding the Chater family’s new growing business are still in negotiation, Gordeuk was unable to comment on it. Gordeuk did say, however, that the other growing business would be more lucrative than the restaurant was.
“To be quite frank, the money potential is in this growing business,” Gordeuk said. “The family is growing and what we are facing [in Middletown] is a small restaurant that can’t grow beyond that.”
According to Gordeuk, Mamoun’s has always been a family business and the two brothers had been looking for another family member to manage the restaurant.
“We were looking to one particular [family] member to take over the business, but he has found his own thing,” Gordeuk said, adding that for past several months, several members of the family had been taking turns managing the restaurant.
The closing of the store does not necessarily preclude the possibility of Mamoun’s participating
in future campus events.
“We have our own vending cart and there were different events on campus that we used to bring the cart to […] which we might still be able to do,” Gordeuk said.
News of the Mamoun’s closing came as a surprise to many, including Terry Concannon, director of Downtown Business District, a division of the Chamber of Commerce.
“I am sorry [about the closing] because it was such a popular restaurant, especially among the Wesleyan student body,” Concannon said. “No one else [in the area] makes Middle Eastern food.”
While Mamoun’s is no longer on Main Street, there are operating chains in Manhattan and New Haven.
“I am sad to hear that Mamoun’s is closed,” said Tara Taylor ’06. “It was special because the only other ones were in New Haven and New York. It was something we shared with those cities.”
The chains in New Haven and New York are popular and established in their respective neighborhoods, according to Gordeuk.
“The store in New Haven is a pillar in the [New Haven] community [….] it’s been here since May 6, 1977,” Gordeuk said.
The original Mamoun’s restaurant, however, is in lower Manhattan, just down the street from Washington Square Park and NYU’s main campus.
According to Gordeuk, the New York chain is widely popular among New Yorkers. Gordeuk recalled the time Wesley Snipes mentioned Mamoun’s on a live taping of the David Letterman Show.
“I happened to be watching the show that night and David Letterman wanted to ask Snipes, a native New Yorker what he does when he comes to New York,” Gordeuk said. “And Snipes said: ‘Well, I usually fly into Kennedy and I take a limo into the city and pick up a couple of falafels at Mamoun’s.’”
After Snipes had mentioned Mamoun’s, there was great uproar in the studio, according to Gordeuk.
“In my experience, I never saw an audience go this crazy and start yelling ‘Yeah, Mamoun’s!,’ he said.
While future plans for the old Mamoun’s building have not yet been publicized, Concannon said it will either be a restaurant or a retail store in compliance with a Middletown law that only allows these types of business in storefronts on Main Street.
”That law was created in the 1990s, and I think it is a very good one,“ Concannon said. ”It preserves the vitality of Main Street.“
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