What really happened is written and hosted by me, Andrew Janks, and produced by Dwayne Johnson,

Danny Garcia, Brian Gowertz, Seven Bucks Productions, and Caden's 13.

It was a date. A woman and I, she told me it was okay to tell the story,

were going out. It was going to start with a simple dinner in the lower east side of Manhattan,

a Middle Eastern restaurant called Mazzesh. I had been once before and knew it wasn't

anything fancy. Mazzesh was a small place, low-key, and I thought it was also very New York City.

You had to walk down a few stairs to get inside. The lighting was dim. Their menu was listed

up on the wall. And it had history. This was the place where famous chef Eddie Hwang started his

first iteration of Bauhaus, and where Andy Ricker began Pock Pock. Frankly, that meant little to me,

but what did mean something was the delicious items on the menu. The beef coughed a sandwich with

hummus, the bedwin chicken, and above all else, they had really good filophils. Mazzesh was that one

word everyone uses way too much these days, but is actually true in this case. The restaurant was

authentic. Anyway, my date was into the food, but not really me. We remain friends.

Regardless, a few months later, when I went back to get another filafel, an authentic filafel,

the restaurant had gone out of business. Now, that was a few years ago. So fast forward to a few weeks

ago. I was watching cable news when I saw an interview pop up with a man named Nasser Jabr. He's

a chef. Since the news has been covering coronavirus 24-7, I found this to be strange. What's a chef

doing on here? He looked familiar, but I couldn't place him, and the volume on my remote wasn't working,

still isn't working, so I couldn't figure out what he was talking about. On the bottom of the

screen was his name, and I looked him up. Now, when I look someone up, I don't just google them,

I go pages and pages deep. I end up on your Instagram, Twitter of course, but I also find all

sorts of details, your favorite t-shirt, your family tree, why you have brown eyes instead of blue,

...