You Can’t Become King Without Making Some Enemies
Cole Sinanian
The King of Falafel is a busy man. On a recent Friday evening, 60-year-old Fares “Freddy” Zeideia bounces around his Astoria restaurant, checking in on diners and offering crispy knobs of fresh falafel wrapped in a napkin to everyone who enters, free of charge.
Also present are a group of building consultants who are here to help Zeideia deal with a potentially expensive headache: he’s facing a fine of up to $6,000 or more from the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) for an allegedly unauthorized light-up sign that hangs from his storefront. Zeideia insists the sign — which reads “STOP GENOCIDE” and “#FreePalestine” — has a permit, and suspects that the complaint that brought DOB inspectors to his restaurant came from someone who was offended by his pro-Palestine messaging.
Born and raised in the village of Ein Yarbud in occupied Palestine, Zeideia does not shy away from inflammatory politics. The entirety of his restaurant, King of Falafel & Shawarma, is decorated in the spirit of the Palestinian resistance against the State of Israel. Among its decor are a street-facing sign depicting President Donald Trump with a clown’s nose and the words “Elect a Clown, Expect a Circus;” a large mural in the dining room of Palestinians resisting the Israeli military with the words “No Migration Except to Jerusalem;” and, perhaps most controversial, a “Walk of Shame” of stickers showing the faces of world leaders and celebrities on the floor leading from the sidewalk outside the restaurant’s door all the way into the toilet bowl in the bathroom at the back. The idea, Zeideia explains, is to allow patrons to step, urinate and defecate on the faces of the people he considers complicit in Israel’s war crimes.
The list is expansive. The faces of Benjamin Netanyahu, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Hilary Clinton, Eric Adams, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi adorn the floor alongside DJ Khaled — the Palestinian-American music producer criticized for his perceived silence on Israel’s destruction of Gaza — as well as authoritarian Arab leaders like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, United Arab Emirates president Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and the Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
”In Hollywood they have the Walk of Fame,” Zeideia said. “Here we have the Walk of Shame.”
The display has brought fines and harassment. A complaint to the Department of Buildings logged in November 2023 described “posters on the sidewalk and the ground in front of the restaurant,” that are “large” and “share their political beliefs,” which the DOB later inspected without issuing a violation. In May 2024, Zeideia was fined $6,350 for the allegedly illegal light-up sign in front of his restaurant. However, Zeidea claimed that in 2023 the DOB inspected the sign, made a few adjustments and issued a permit, which is visible on the sign’s underside.
A more recent complaint, logged in September 2025, concerns the same sign and accuses it of “very inappropriate messages,” highlighting that it is near a bus stop that kids use and therefore “needs to come down.” DOB inspectors came again to inspect the sign on December 16, concluding that the sign was unauthorized, despite the permit on its underside, and told Zeideia that they would return for a more thorough inspection in the coming weeks.
But perhaps more concerning were the death threats. Zeideia described his employees regularly receiving calls to the restaurant from people threatening to burn it down and kill him and his family.
“They start talking, saying ‘tell your boss we’re gonna kill him,’” Zeideia said. “He better take that shit out or he’s gonna lose his life.’”
Once, a TikTok influencer took a viral video of the restaurant and its many stepped-on photos of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. Someone sent the video to a Saudi Arabian influencer, and within hours, Zeideia had some 40,000 one-star Google reviews.
“They were so happy, they thought they shut me down,” he said. “Then I ordered 30 more pictures of the prince, I expedited it, I paid $300 more. Then I put it on the street the next day.”
Another time, an Egyptian woman was offended to see the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, on the walk of shame. She entered the bathroom, removed her underwear, and stuffed it into the toilet bowl, causing the bathroom to flood.
It’s annoying, yes, but Zeideia is used to brushing off threats. He’s dealt with them since he first opened his food truck back in 2002, which eventually evolved into his current restaurant on Broadway, opening in 2016. Just after 9/11, this was an uncomfortable time to be an Arab-American. Zeideia faced regular threats, to which he responded with falafel.
“People used to pass by and say ‘go back to where you came from,” Zeideia recounted. “They’d say ‘you’re a terrorist,” I’d say ‘no, I’m not a terrorist. Have some falafel. And I started giving falafel to everyone.”
While the DOB has yet to issue a second fine, Zeideia’s customers have rallied to support him and his message. A GoFundMe page started by a 22-year-old Long Island resident named Kyra Sorkin has already raised close to $13,000 in just over a week, nearly double the expected fine. Sorkin, despite living a 30-minute train ride away from Astoria, has long been a loyal customer at King of Falafel & Shawarma. When Zeideia posted an Instagram video explaining the situation, Sorkin — who’s experienced in crowdfunding campaigns — reached out, offering to help him.
“It’s some of the best Palestinian food I’ve ever had,” Sorkin said. “It’s a place that I want to support, that I always bring friends to when they visit New York.
She continued: “I really appreciate how steadfast Freddy is in his advocacy for his people. I think that’s really nice to see, especially these days when it’s so intimidating.”
But the support of his community can do little to alleviate the immense suffering in Palestine, Zeideia said. When Israel’s bombardment of Gaza began after October 7, 2023, his stress level reached new heights. So distraught was Zeideia that his chest would seize up in pain, causing him to collapse. A cardiologist told him that he had been having miniature heart attacks, and that he needed immediate open heart surgery.
“I’m 60,” Zeideia said. “Looking at the people in Gaza who are dying in their tents…what could possibly happen? I’m not gonna be out on the street worrying about dying. I’ll have medication, I’ll have food, I’m not gonna die of hunger. How about these people who can’t eat, who are bones?”
