Falafels

While I was in Bloomington last Monday, I stopped at the Trojan Horse and picked up some cheesespa’rer - a spinach and feta cheese spread - to take home for Amy; and I grabbed a copy of something called Bloom magazine, which I had never seen before, and took that home, too. We flipped through the dining guide in the back of the magazine on the way to Bloomington on Friday, and got to thinking that we would try something new on this trip, instead of the old stand-bys.

We pondered some of the ethnic places on 4th Street, but never made it that far once we got into town. There were no curbside places to park on 4th Street, so we had to go up to 7th Street and find a block that was public parking and not residential only - and that meant that we had to walk through downtown to get to 4th Street. We decided to walk past a place called Falafels and take a look in the window and at the menu posted on the door - and we decided that we liked what we saw, so that was where we ate.

The place is located at Kirkwood and Dunn, in the ever-changing complex of businesses known as Dunkirk Square. Those who went to IU in the mid-90s may remember a record store that doubled as an espresso bar, which I seem to recall was named Roscoe’s - but I also seem to recall that Roscoe’s was on the second level, and this restaurant (and the record store and espresso bar it used to be) is not. It was two in the afternoon or so when we got there, and I think we were the only ones there, so we were seated pretty quickly. The interior was all wood tables and chairs painted in reds and greens and felt sort of like a plastic bazaar, if said bazaar had been picked up by a twister and deposited in the Shire.




The menu was straight Middle Eastern fare, with no particular emphasis on falafel (though it was on the menu) - it’s just a clever name! I had the Tastes of Jerusalem, a sampler that included falafel, hummus and pita, salad, and a choice of two other items. (Three of the choices were dolmas, which they called something else, babaganoush, and mamaganoush. My choices were the dolmas and babaganoush - but they were out of the babaganoush, so I had the mamaganoush, which was pieces of feta cheese wrapped in thin slices of roasted eggplant.) Amy had the falafel sandwich with a side of couscous.





You may get the idea from the picture that the hummus was served up on the plate rather like you might see a great mound of mashed potatoes and gravy served up at Thanksgiving dinner - and so it was. The stuff in the middle was plain old tahini, the sesame paste that is blended with garbanzo beans to create hummus. Most of the time, hummus has got other things going on in it - garlic and lemon juice are the usual suspects - but this version tasted like it was nothing more than the two main ingredients, and that was a somewhat surprisingly satisfying change of pace - there just didn’t need to be quite so much on the plate.

The dolmas, grape leaves stuffed with rice (and sometimes ground beef, but here only with rice), were a bit less satisfying. They were a little oily and squishy - there’s a fine line between marinating and soaking, and these were not on the happy side of that line. Mamaganoush, on the other hand, was interesting. I’ve never “gotten” eggplant - but this was a thin, roasted (and maybe smoked, too) slice, without any of the seedy goop from the eggplant’s middle, wrapped around a little rectangular hunk of feta cheese. Pleasant counterpoint between the sweet roasted flavor of the eggplant and the sharp sour taste of the feta.

The balls of falafel - ground garbanzo beans, mixed with parsley, garlic, and onions, and then deep-fried - were a little bit heavy on the deep-fried (they come close to exploding like little bombs when you cut them in half with a fork), but largely absent the filler that you sometimes get with bush league falafel, which lets the flavor of the garbanzo beans and parsley come through.

Oddly enough, it was that little mound of salad that was the highlight of this particular meal - at least for me. Nothing but field greens dressed lightly with an oil-and-lemon-juice combination that was mostly lemon juice and paired well with greens that were so fresh and earthy that they might well have been plucked from the ground that morning.

This one is well worth your time if you want to get your Mediterranean/Middle Eastern groove on and have been to Trojan Horse one too many times. It doesn’t hold a candle to the better Greek places in Indianapolis, but it works in Bloomington, where Mediterranean cuisine is actually a bit underrepresented.