Halal

Finally, after four years, I convinced my wife to try the Afghan restaurant on Franklin and Laguna. And it was sublime.

The strip mall "complex" at this corner is probably the worst design any suburban architect or urban planner has ever come up with. At major intersections in every damn city in America all we get are these clusters of shopping centers, strip retail and supermarkets. But Elk Grove has taken the cake with the design here at the northwest corner by creating a dozen strip retail outlets that face...the parking lot. Not visible from the street. While there are six hundred and ninety two thousand vehicles driving by these strip stores monthly, the vacancy rate has exceeded 60% since it's been built and will remain an utter fucking wasteland for decades to come because it's a noplace, unknown to all pedestrians and vehicles.

In this wasteland have come and gone about three dozen local retailers, but one that has surprisingly stood the test of Elk Grovian ineptitude is the Afghan Kabob Palace. This makes sense, as places like this always tend to survive due to word of mouth and a culture that values the company of each other rather than the company of material goods. We walked into a stripmall storefront as barren and desolate as you can possibly find (wondering if it was even open) into a restaurant full of locals, bustling with activity, full of patrons...essentially thriving. The Kabob Palace actually rents two stores, with the wall to the adjacent store removed providing for a banquet or large seating area for parties and such.

I was so glad to finally try this place...aside from a penchant for exotic food, I am so in favor of buying local products from local merchants. While the raw materials might not be of a local origin, I can never really be sure in a restaurant to begin with, but a locally owned store at least has a much higher probability of sourcing local raw materials than any chain restaurant. The lamb might come from a Halal butcher in the East Bay. Cilantro from the Capay valley. Jasmine rice from central California.

Anyway, there is no closer a restaurant to my house than this place, and for four years I've not once tried it, but I've must have thought about it twenty score times. And my wife liked it. Someplace close for us to continue to get good food while keeping more dollars in the community.