In a post called Competing Falafel Unbleached Brun, an American blogger, reviews two Middle Eastern restaurants. One is called Old City Cafe of Jerusalem. The other’s name is Amsterdamm Falafelshop. Both are places making falafel in the US capital, the guy’s hometown.

Judging from the pictures (you should certainly visit brun), both places make decent foods – and that’s includes the hummus, that looks like something I would try to eat. Brun was more detailed about their falafel offering, which sounds reasonable – pretty much what every falafel joint in Israel has to offer, more or less.

But hey, forget about that. Just take a minute to think of how falafel has gone global.

You can find it all over Europe these days; For years you could it eat in the city New-York and now also elsewhere acrross the states. It has landed in the far east too. For example, the Jordanian-Italian owned Za’atar restaurant from the Shunyi district, about which you can read a review here.

 

It’s not just falafel of course. You have numerous places in every large city in the world, owned by former Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians etc, making Middle Eastern food such as falafel, hummus, msabbha, shawarma, and so on.

Also, you have numerous Greek, Turkish and Egyptian places, making these dishes which aren’t really their home cuisine (accept for the Egyptians making Taamiya, the fava-bean burger which is the ancestor of falafel).

Personally, on my trips to Berlin (you can read all about them in our Berlin Blog), I came across only one Lebanease falafel place which was excellent. That was after I already ate in several Turkish places and one Kurd, most of which, mmm… sucked.

So there are many imitations and some serious falafel-spam to filter, but there’s no doubt in my mind that my theory is correct: falafel is conquering the world. Of course, only to make way for the real hummus revolution.