I'd like to share two words with you: Paris, and falafel.
Baguettes, croissants, beignets, crepes, chocolate, cheese, wine, beer, Italian food, and ice cream (and something called flammkuche which basically turned out to be pizza stroganoff) will get you through Europe as a vegetarian, or as someone who is married to one. And the ice cream will get you very far when travelling with children. But when you get to the end, sometimes you just need falafel. Parisian falafel should be considered a tourist attraction in its own right - I ate the best falafel sandwich of my life there, and it was truly a thing of beauty, like everything in Paris. After more than a week of also truly beautiful, but heavy food, my body heaved a sigh of relief as I ate, saying, “Aaaah, vegetables, how I missed you!”
The hole-in-the-wall place where we got our falafel had a little salad bar where you could add your own toppings, including (but not limited to) tabbouleh, green and black olives, radish salad, and an amazing concoction of parsley, olive oil and red chili flakes which I'm sure has a name, so please let me know if you know what it is. I'm going to research it when I get home. The aubergine included an oily slab of roasted eggplant, in addition to the falafel. And of course the falafel were crispy on the outside, and moist on the inside. But I could have been eating lumps of clay and I wouldn't have cared, because the salade was so good.
We loved it so much, the next day we bought two more sandwiches to eat in our hotel in Brussels after we drove in from Paris. That was definitely a good call, because after being lost for more than an hour, getting a full unplanned tour of Brussels (lovely, and surprisingly gritty), asking approximately 10 people for directions (including two slightly punk-rock Dutch tourists, a parking lot attendant, a policeman, and a convenience store clerk who did not speak English but very fortunately spoke Hindi), and enduring countless plaintive cries of “I need to go to the bathroom,” those falafel sandwiches were a very welcome sight indeed after we plunked our luggage down and collapsed into our hotel room chairs.
More to come in India...
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2 comments:
Did you visit L'As du Fallafel in Paris? The best ever.
Loved the previous radish post. Best wishes on your travels.
We didn't make it to L'As, though I've heard of it, and wanted to try. It just didn't work out, as we had only two days (and two kids with limited endurance). The place we went to was called Maoz Vegetarian, right in the neighborhood where we were staying, across the street from a Lebanese place which we also tried. I did some research, and it turns out that Maoz is part of an international franchise of entirely vegetarian falafel restaurants started by an Israeli couple living in Amsterdam. I can't vouch for the others, but the Paris location rocked. We will be returning to Paris someday, and when that happens L'As du Fallafel will be on the to-do list.
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