NAME THIS JOINT.(The Talk of the Town)

Not long ago, Erez Itzhaki, a thirty-four-year-old Israeli real-estate broker and developer, and his business partner, Eric Salomon, decided to sponsor a contest to name their latest venture, a shawarma-and-falafel restaurant on Third Avenue at St. Mark's Place. Wanting to involve their new community--they have worked mostly in SoHo--they posted a bright-yellow advertisement for the contest over their boarded-up storefront (www.name-our-restaurant.com) and offered twenty-five hundred dollars to the winner. So far, seven thousand people have sent in roughly thirteen thousand entries.

Itzhaki, whose previous entrepreneurial activities have not offered him much occasion for invention (he has arranged retail leases for Starbucks and Zales), didn't come up with anything good on his own. "First, we thought Shawafel"--shawarma and falafel--"then, no, we can't pronounce it," he said the other day, in his lower-Broadway offices. He was wearing a pin-striped suit and a yellow silk tie. "My wife is living twenty years here. She said no. We should choose a catchy name, short, easy to pronounce." (Itzhaki's wife's name is Sheerlee. She changed the spelling of her Israeli name, Shirley, because in America everyone pronounced it "Sure-lee." Recently, the Itzhakis had a baby girl and named her Shiraz, a blend of Sheerlee and Erez, and now Shiraz is the only kind of wine they drink.)

The restaurant, which opens later this month, was Itzhaki's father's idea, and he will be the cook. For many years, Rami Itzhaki operated a shawarma-and-falafel place in Israel called Jacko & Sons (shawarma is sliced marinated meat on pita--a Middle Eastern version of a gyro). Visiting New York, he wanted to try the local cuisine. "He said, 'Sushi, sushi, sushi'--we ate one day sushi and then he wanted to eat shawarma and falafel. He said, 'Let me open a restaurant here. I'm sure it's going to be packed.' I said, 'Are you sure?' My father said, 'If they could get used to Mexican food, why can't they get used to Israeli food?' Falafel and shawarma--three hundred years ...