A day that began with ants (as far too many do lately), and later featured both an in-person Shohei Ohtani home run and an utterly wild claim that the best tacos in the world are to be found in Ashland, Oregon, and finally ended with a black bear wandering through our suburban small-town neighborhood …
… well, that’s a day.
Before getting into what was by far our most successful falafel excursion of the summer, a note on ants, animals, and other wildlife incursions. Maybe it’s just another instance of Baader Meinhof phenomenom, but doesn’t it seem like human-animal/insectial interactions are on the upswell? Mountain lions killed crossing highways … skunks in the backyard …
… murder wasps … stingray assassinations … tiger mosquitos…. Taken together, isn’t it almost enough to make you not logically blame global warming and instead think … conspiracy? As in: the animals are plotting against us! Which means, when those Argentine ants running through your house are merely part of a single five-hundred mile-long colony that runs from San Diego to San Francisco: Time to worry!
Or … eat falafel.
Yesterday we headed down to Anaheim’s Little Arabia, a great neighborhood teeming with Arabic groceries and restaurants (we even spied a Yemeni restaurant, House of Mandi, that we’re intrigued to try in the future). We went to three falafel places reputed to be among the best in Southern California: Kareem’s Falafel, Sababa Falafel Shop, and Sahara Falafel, all located within about a mile and a half of each other on Brookhurst Avenue.
While they have obvious similarities, the three couldn’t have been more different. Kareem’s, the oldest falafel place in the area (1995), feels almost like a hidden bungalow set within a strip mall: you pull open an opaque door and step into a small room with a few tables that diners are quietly chatting at while eating beautiful looking food. Just past the tables is the counter, and scattered around are bags and boxes of various ingredients. Outside, Kareem’s has a pleasant and mostly shaded patio, and contemporary music is playing (not too loud). The place just has a nice relaxed feeling to it.
Sababa, on the other hand, was almost overwhelmingly bustling: a couple tables are set up outside the front door of Sababa’s (also in a corner mini-strip mall, next door to a 7-11), and these small tables were filled with people chowing down. Inside, the line is thrumming and the men behind the counter are friendlily calling at customers and asking what they want and even offering free falafel samples. Sababa isn’t really an eat-in experience, while the food looked amazing and the place is clearly popular, it definitely has that Chipotle-style set up that always makes us a little wary. Partially because the Chipotle set-up is a Subway set-up, and no one wants to think about Subway sandwiches when eating real food.
Sahara was our last stop. It has this bomb mural:
But Sahara lacked both the chill vibe of Kareem’s and the manic energy of Sababa. It was empty (4:30 on a Saturday). We presume it was the owner who helped us, and he was chatty in a mostly good way. He generously gave us a sample of falafel to eat while we waited (a falafel snack that, he told us, he’d made for himself), and he hand-packed and fried our falafels, was coy about the ingredients in his sauces and falafel, and, not even knowing about FalafelQuest©, explained to us why the ‘other’ falafel places in the area (he didn’t name names) lacked the integrity of his because of others’ inattention to quality ingredients. While there’s something charming about an opinionated restauranteur–there’s a refreshingness to be found in sincerity–but this was also a little off-putting. He comments seemed to come from a place of defensiveness/insecurity instead, of say, happy pride. Which, sure, we get it, we’re as defensive and insecure as anyone. But it casts a little pall on the food.
To the falafel.
Kareem’s: we ordered their “falapeno” falafels (see first image of post) and the OTT Wrap, which comes with rice, falafel, hummus, avocado, and green chili sauce (the last two: only allegedly). The falafel order also came with sauces and an excellent house-baked pita (homemade: more pillowy than the flat industrial pita from stores). The wrap was a rice bomb, emphasis on rice, emphasis on bomb, but the falafels? Wow.
- Texture: 4.5/5: we’re starting to disagree a little about falafel size–Vieve likes the smaller mini-sizes, while I like the whiskey ice ball size. These were the latter, so win for me. Both the regular (from the wrap) and the jalapeno-infused falafels had lovely audibly crunchy exteriors and that almost pillowy interior we haven’t seen since Ammatoli. Very, very good.
- Spice: 4.5/5: these had a great mix of standard falafel spices, your cumin and etc … but the jalapeno falafels had slices of pickled jalapenos affixed to the balls and then they were fried together into an amazing creation: pickly, spicy, wonderful. Best of the summer.
- Herbaceousness: 3/5: Nicely greenish, but fairly mellow–more spice/jalapeno flavor here.
- Value: 3.5/5: a dollar per standard size falafel. Industry standard.
Next up was Sababa. While we don’t love their assembly-line set-up, the falafel was also great. Here we only ordered a small side of falafel, six pieces for four bucks, with sides of their red chili and tahini sauces.
- Texture: 3.5/5: So these are more to Vieve’s size: the smallest falafel we’ve seen all summer, the diameter of a quarter, if that, tiny little round balls of falafel. Since they’re so small, they probably can’t be fried too long without destroying them–and that sacrifices quite a bit of our desired falafel exterior crunch. These have more the mouthfeel of baked falafel–not so much a crunch as a readily-yielding minor toothsome resistance.
- Spice: 4/5: these tasted, to me, quite a bit like the falafel at Father Nature Lavash Bistro–which, as you know, come from a dry mix. Cumin-forward, a little heavily salted, definite hints of cayenne … these aren’t so much bold as they are delicious little nuggets that have a manufactured sense to them, the kind of falafel you could buy a big bag of and find yourself mindlessly dipping your hands into every few minutes for just one more … well maybe one more … why not another? Very good.
- Herbaceousness: n/a: All about the spice.
- Value: 2/5: about 65 cents per mini falafel–tasty, if not a great value.
Last was (somewhat sad) Sahara. We got the falafel plate–eight falafel, a side salad, hummus, and pita (the pita was handed to us in a store-bought bag lol).
- Texture: 4/5: Back to the normal whiskey ball size, with the elegant peaked dome. Well fried right before our eyes–he had these going in the oil for about 7 minutes, give or take, a little longer than I expected but which yielded an excellently crunchy exterior. A little oilier than Kareem’s, the interior a little damper/closer, but very good.
- Spice: 3/5: nice balance of spices here, but once again we entered odd-spice-flavor-we-could-not-identify-land. Some people use cinnamon or nutmeg in their falafel blends, and I suspect these might have had a touch specifically of the latter. They didn’t taste bad, not at all … but they did taste different in a way that seemed a little more of a detour than an expansion of what good falafel can be.
- Herbaceousness: 3.5/5: very green, nicely packed with parsley and probably cilantro. These flavors, as always, could have been more prominent, but at least they were visually there.
- Value: 3/5: we couldn’t figure out how much a stand-alone side of falafel was (the owner really was a bit of a pill), but the plate, with eight falafel and hummus and salad, came in at fourteen dollars … so we’ll put that at a little more than a buck per falafel, a touch above normal price.
And thus ends our sixth of likely eight … oh, shit, wait, I forgot: we also had falafel last week, at Limone Mediterranean (in Glendora Public Market). Literally sitting around on Sunday afternoon, wondering what to do for lunch, my phone buzzed with a Yelp falafel notification a couple miles down the road. Why not?
Oh–because local falafels, with rare exception, aren’t very good.
- Texture: 2.5/5: A little smaller than standard size, but pretty close. These could have been fried a touch longer–the exterior pulled apart more than crackled–and the interior was still wet when we cracked them open. (I asked how they were prepared–the normal ground up long-soaked chickpeas mixed with chermoula, an herb sauce. No wonder they were wet.) That there is a no-no.
- Spice, herbaceousness, value: 3/5: the chermoula flavors didn’t translate at all–there is a challenge on the table, how to get the herb flavor come out more in falafel–and the spices were fine, a nice kick, blah blah blah. These weren’t bad, but they not something we’d get again.
Okay … so that’s it, our sixth of what will likely be nine falafel posts. We’ve eaten falafel so far from eighteen different shops. We’ve had fantastic falafel at 4-5 of them, solid falafel at 2-3, and a lot of sort of not very good falafel. But this outing was a success, by far our best of the summer, and our final two should — hopefully! — make for as good if not better. After that, we plan to wrap up with our own efforts at making the best falafel we can, applying what if anything we’ve learned. So more to come, and in the meantime: be kind to ants or they will communicate with their animal and insect brethren. And you could be next.