Year of Eating Differently (59): Maezo, Old Compton Street

Again, it was a cold and miserable day, so we wandered down to Old Compton Street, where I could cheer myself up by looking in the window of Skinny White Boy before going back for a two-hour HR briefing on how to fill in forms. I was expecting another small cafe, but then the blinding bright green frontage of Maezo attracted us, and we wandered in. By the look of it the place had been open a week, although the woman behind the bar assured us it had been there for 6 years.
As the picture above shows, their brand seems to be a bit ... well, possibly overtargetted to their environs. I don't want to be crude, but the mouth of the guy on the left, and the whole singlet thing the guy on the right is into; it's just a bit too ashamedly rough trade for lunchtime. (I could digress here into the unpleasantness of Georgina's in the Covered Market in Oxford [it 'oozes sex' apparently] but we'll leave that treat for another day.)
Anyway, Maezo does felafel, in pitta with salad, but for some strange reason they're called maezo instead. Possibly this is to distinguish them from 'the runner up prize' when you go to a kebab shop and everyone else is eating sliced elephant leg. But you also get chips, which is a nicetie. All good, but the construction is a bit overwrought - first you order, then you get your felafel in a little pitta with a cardboard holder, and then you go back along the counter to pick out your own salad and add that in, at which point you're having to galumph through the lunchtime queue and then double back on yourself to sit down. So not very well thought out by a time-and-motion standard.
It is good felafel though - high on the dirtiness stakes, and unlike Cafe Arlington yesterday it has the right ratio of bread to filth. Good selection of salads, although I wimped out of the beetroot. Chips were possibly a bit much - felt like I was going to burst while listening to the intricacies of career appraisals half an hour later...