Lost and Found and Lebanese

I don't know from what substance a sense of place is made. Is it an attachment of memories? Or fixed loyalties? Or fixed prejudices? Or mere appetite? For most of us, a few places satisfy; lots of places don't.

Even if they're completely ordinary - and if there are enough of them - the places that satisfy make up a geography of home.

Part of a sense of place, I suppose, is persistence. And part of it certainly is patience.

There were - and are - lots of restaurants along the section of Second Street in Long Beach called Belmont Shore. The street has had its several lives in the 40 years I've often walked it from Park Avenue to Bay Shore Avenue, where the bridge crosses Alamitos Bay to Naples island. Some places on Second Street are local dives and there for decades. Some are on the tail end of whatever was a trend long enough to reach Long Beach.

Years ago, there was a Lebanese restaurant on Second Street called Sahara whose owner/chef was George. George had a passion for making and serving food - specifically grilled meats and the small plates of the Lebanese mezze. His restaurant was a place, distinctive in tone and style - George's style - and, if you liked Lebanese cooking, it was a satisfying place to get shish taouk, kofta, kibbeh . . . the usual.

But, of course, it wasn't usual. Sahara and George would not have persisted in memory had they been.

Sahara was swept away in 1991 in some intermediate stage of the incomplete gentrification on Second Street, lost to higher rents or someone's ambition to deliver what was thought to be popular (and which was hopelessly old hat shortly after).

Over the years, I would wistfully tell people about George and Sahara and the meals there. It was a missing location that served as my marker for the unsatisfied longing that is part of having a sense of place.

Lately, there has been an odd sort of resurgence of Lebanese cuisine on Second Street. There are three Lebanese restaurants on a very short stretch, and one of them has two outlets within a few hundred feet of each other.

These are fine places, but inevitably none of them measures up to my memories of Sahara.

Another Lebanese place opened up last year - is Long Beach the mezze Mecca? It's called Baba Ghanouj. It's on Atlantic Avenue in the Bixby Knolls section of Long Beach - a district with another conflicted history of mid-century suburbanization, some decline, and some recent gentrification.

I'd gone there several times after trying the Second Street trio of Lebanese places. Not exactly looking for the perfect shish taouk, but hopeful. Baba Ghanouj was good. The atmospherics were good. The staff good. I'd have said that it was almost as good as Sahara.

Until I learned recently, after being warmly greeted by George Mitri, that he and Sahara by a new name had returned. George had done other things since Sahara, had begun other restaurants, but had come back to his mother's traditions of Lebanese cooking. The Lebanese that was lost is now found at Baba Ghanouj.

One of the ways in which an anonymous stretch of L.A. nowhere becomes a place is through patience.

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