Mamoun’s Falafel Restaurant turns 45

Zofia Filipczak Photos.

Suleiman Chater remembers the days when Mamoun's Falafel Restaurant served hundreds of customers at a time out of its small storefront on Howe Street. 

It was 1977 and his uncle Mamoun Chater, the restaurant’s namesake, opened a New Haven outpost of the family’s popular Middle Eastern restaurant that started in Greenwich Village in 1971. 

This year, Mamoun's New Haven location, the first outside of New York, marks 45 years of serving falafel and other authentic foods from the family’s homeland of Damascus, Syria. Over four decades later, there are satellites in New York, Connecticut, Georgia and New Jersey. 

Today, all the Mamoun's locations are run by Chater family descendants like Suleiman Chater, who runs the Howe Street location.

“I have been here for 30 years,” Suleiman Chater said. “It's a family business and my father used to run the New Haven store.”

The original owner Mamoun Chater, framed in New Haven’s Mamoun’s Falafel restaurant. Zofia Filipczak Photos.

“A friend of my uncle Mamoun was in New Haven and we used to get 200 [customers at] a time in the 70s,” he recalled. “There was a culinary art school and he asked if we would open a place here. My uncle and my dad worked it out and opened it up in New Haven.” 

Chater said the family prides itself in continuing to only use the passed-down, family recipes and fresh ingredients. 

“We grow our own mint, right here in our garden,” a restaurant employee said. 

That mint is used as an ingredient in the restaurant’s lemonade. Mamoun’s also cooks strictly halal meats and while also offering vegetarian-friendly options like their famous falafel sandwich, typically dressed with lettuce, tomatoes, and tahini sauce packed into pita bread with hummus. 

Not only is the food authentic, but so is the environment. The walls are decorated with woven rugs and framed Arabic words.

Top: Suleiman Chater, the owner of New Haven's Mamoun's Falafel restaurant. Bottom: The mint that the restaurant uses in its dishes. Zofia Filipczak Photos.

Restaurants were forced to change how they operate because of Covid-19 and Chater said Mamoun’s was no different. 

He said they used the heightened attention toward cleanliness and social distancing to focus on delivering great customer service to keep both customers and employees safe. 

“We have survived through good service and just being good people,” Chater said. “We should work towards whatever is in the best safety of the public, we all want to go home to our loved ones.” 

As the years have passed, the environment around Mamoun's has changed even though the restaurant looks much like it did when it opened 45 years ago.

New restaurants featuring other cuisines have come and gone on Howe Street (Mamoun's for years collaborated with Miya's, a Howe Street sustainable sushi spot which closed at the end of 2020). New sky-high apartments are called home by college students and empty nesters. Ongoing upgrades to the Yale campus are booming all around. 

Chater said Mamoun's benefits from the ways in which the community has grown and changed over the last 45 years—and the business also gives back. One way it does this is by utilizing a bit of technology that didn’t exist when the restaurant threw open its doors over four decades ago.

Now, customers can order falafel through the restaurant’s website, as well as through apps like Snackpass, which Chater said he is proud to support because of the people who created it. Yale undergraduates Kevin Tan and Jamie Marshall founded Snackpass in 2017, but its popularity exploded during the pandemic.

“It’s completely run by Yale students…because of that I like to support local businesses and the Yale students,'' Chater said. 

Emmanuel. Zofia Filipczak Photos.

Some customers still kick it old school. There are students like Emmanuel (he did not give his last name), a postdoc who still likes to order his Mamoun’s the old fashioned way: by walking up to the Howe Street counter. He said during a recent visit that he’s a fan of Middle Eastern cuisine and enjoys eating at the restaurant.

“I found this place particularly good with falafel,” he said. “I really like the French fries. It’s kind of a fast food and it’s very good for the category they fall into.”

 This piece comes to the Arts Paper through the fifth annual Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI), a program of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. Read more about the program here or by checking out the "YAJI" tag. Zofia Filipczak is a rising senior at Engineering and Science University Magnet School (ESUMS).