Patel Plaza is conveniently located on Church St. in North Decatur. I say "conveniently located," because it's on the way to Your Dekalb Farmer's Market, which is where I head every other week for the best produce around.
Patel Plaza is home to Last Chance Thrift Store – great bargains await on 1/2-price Mondays – as well as several Indian and Pakistani specialty stores. There's a little Wafflehouse tucked away on the side road that runs behind the shopping center to Dekalb Industrial Parkway.
To take a tangent, it's always amazed me how two clashing nationalities, Indian and Pakistani in this instance, can occupy the same spaces in the U.S..
My first exposure to such a phenomenon was in D.C. when I had an Eritrean friend who mingled regularly with Ethiopians while the two countries were at war. It was an interesting dynamic and spending Friday nights with him and his mates showed me how closely intertwined the two nationalities had become states-side.
I was shown the differences between Eritrean and Ethiopian night clubs, cuisine, music and dance moves, but none of these places were ever exclusively Eritrean or Ethiopian and they were generally within close proximity to one another (U Street Corridor or Adams Morgan). The scene was especially electric when the two countries agreed to their final terms of peace in 2003.
