Falafel

Fried to order or not at all

The mix is chickpeas ground with a serious amount of parsley and cilantro, onion, garlic, cumin, and coriander. That herb load is what turns the inside green and keeps it light instead of pasty. We scoop and fry only when the ticket prints. Three or four minutes in hot oil gives you a shell with real crunch and an interior that stays moist and fluffy, which is a window of maybe twenty minutes before any falafel on earth starts to fade. So we don't make them ahead. Simple rule, big difference.

Bite one in half and look at it. If it's green and steaming, that's the whole quality control program right there.

Texture is the whole argument with falafel, so here's the standard we hold ourselves to: the crust should crackle audibly, the inside should be light enough that it never sits heavy, and the herbs should taste like herbs, not like dried flakes from a jar. We grind the mix in-house in small batches, because chickpea batter that sits around too long goes dense, and dense falafel is one of the saddest foods on earth.

How to run it

Order it as a wrap and it gets the full Patar treatment: fresh lavash, pickled turnips, cucumbers, tomato, and either tahini or our toum. Toum on falafel is technically off-script and absolutely worth it, the garlic doing for the chickpea what it does for the chicken. Or get the pieces on their own with sauce for dipping, which is the move for the table when a group can't agree on anything.

Falafel plus hummus is the all-vegan power order, and nobody at the table will feel like they got the consolation meal. Add fries and you've built a meatless feast at a shawarma shop, which we consider a feature, not an irony.

The vegan anchor of the menu

Every crew has one. The friend who doesn't eat meat and is tired of ordering sides while everyone else feasts. The falafel exists so that person eats as well as everybody else at this counter, at noon or at 1 AM, because the fryer runs as late as the spits do. Glendale's late-night vegan options are thin. We take that gap seriously.

It's also just good, full stop, and plenty of committed carnivores order a couple of pieces alongside their shawarma. Delivery through DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Grubhub holds up fine, but fried-to-order food rewards pickup. Call (747) 377-0707 and time it right.