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Road to prosperity is 2-way

Mohamed Abu Seif's restaurant on the highway to Baghdad once had a prime site.

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published February 27, 2007

RUWAISHED, Jordan - For a time in 2003, Mohamed Abu Seif ran what may have been the most popular restaurant in the Middle East.

It was on the east edge of town, where the road to Baghdad uncoils like a parched tongue across 200 miles of empty, wind-swept desert. The restaurant stayed open 24 hours a day, and journalists from around the world crowded its tables, waiting for shock and awe so they could enter Iraq.

One day, someone - maybe from CNN, which had rented every room in the worn hotel across the street - stuck his business card on the wall near the counter. Someone else did, too. Then another and another. The New York Times. BBC. Le Monde. Fox News. Corriere della Sera. The Irish Times. NBC. The Washington Post. The St. Petersburg Times.

On a recent trip to the Middle East, I stopped in Ruwaished. What happened to the restaurant that used to be here? I asked a guy tinkering with an old Mercedes. He directed me and my interpreter to the other end of town.

We found Seif, 40 and round-faced, sitting behind the counter of a new restaurant. He still calls the place "Abu Seif Restaurant for Food Delicious," but these days, few stop to savor the hummus or the baba ghanoush or the shawarma, roasted lamb shaved paper thin. Just a lone figure in the corner, cupping a glass of sweet tea and staring at the TV, tuned to Al Jazeera and the latest carnage in Iraq.

Seif looked pleased when I said I had eaten in his place back in the early days of the war.

You were really busy then, uh? So many journalists. So many cards.

Those were great days. Those cards, they covered the whole wall.

What happened to your old restaurant?

I rented it. Then I built this one. We had the land, it was in the family. Nobody knew what was going to happen.

With Iraq liberated, ending 12 years of international isolation, traffic would be heavy between Jordan and Baghdad, Seif assumed. So he took the $300,000 he made feeding the media and opened a new, much larger restaurant. It had Western-style toilets and a broad, covered patio for alfresco dining.

For a while, business did okay. But by April 2004 the insurgency was so strong and the road so dangerous that most journalists and contractors started flying to Baghdad. Now, three years later, we were the only ones eating Abu Seif's food delicious.

Does anyone come here now?

Only trucks. Maybe two out of 10 stop. The rest, they have their own stuff with them. If I knew it would be this way, I'd never have built this place. Now it's nothing. You work for nothing. I had 27 employees. Now I have eight, and I can't pay them.

What happened to all the business cards?

They're in a suitcase. A little suitcase at home.

Why didn't you put the cards back up?

Because nobody comes.

If I gave you a card, would you put it up?

Abu Seif took my card - from a newspaper he has never heard of, in a country he has never seen - and considered it a moment. Then he turned to the big photo mural of a sandy beach and sun-dappled palms behind the counter. He stuck the card in the frame to the left. Then he moved it to a more prominent position, right under the clock that ticks off the long, slow days.

Encounters

About the series

Encounters is dedicated to small but meaningful stories. Sometimes they will play out far from the tumult of the daily news; sometimes they may be part of the news. To comment or suggest an idea for a story, please contact editor Mike Wilson at mike@sptimes.com or 727892-2924.

[Last modified February 27, 2007, 00:34:08]