Get the za’atar flatbread. Traditional Lebanese man’ousheh is moon-dusted with the killer spice blend. Not any za’atar, though. Owner George Salameh couldn’t find one he liked locally, so he searched the old country, found the best, and shipped over 3,000 pounds of it to this little strip mall in College Area. This is Alforon.
Born and raised in Lebanon, war broke out when he was a teen. As moms do, his stepped in. “She asked my dad to pull me out for that summer,” George says.”And that summer is still going.”
Eventually, he made his way to San Diego, spent time selling cars at a dealership. At the time, San Diego’s flatbread game pretty much stopped at “pita.” Salameh always said someone should open a shop serving manakish of all kinds. So when he got laid off, that’s what he did. On top, he put the kind of food his grandmother would start cooking on Wednesday to feed the family on Sunday.
“My dream at the time was just to make a living,” he says. “Clients would come in and say, we haven’t had this type of flatbread since the old country. And we made it because we also missed it.”
Customers started asking George to make the Middle Eastern dishes they remembered—from their grandmas, from the streets they grew up on. Little by little, the place took its own shape, built on those requests.
Now, Alforon’s menu is basically a collection of memories for San Diego’s Middle Eastern community. Memories of loved ones, of loved places.
The emotional impact? It’s measured in sticky notes—thousands of them. On the counter, in binded books; all handwritten, many in Arabic, saying the same thing: “Thanks for giving me a taste of where I’m from.”
