"I don't like falafel" is a lie I used to tell myself.
It started many years ago, living at home with my family - my sister went on a middle-eastern kick and convinced our father to prepare some falafel for dinner from a store-bought boxed dry mix. It was bland and dry, so I came to the conclusion that the fault lay in the very idea of falafel.
This changed in my first year living in Toronto. I was out with some chums at a concert at the nearby Tranzac, and we wanted something to eat, fast and cheap. "Sarah's!" some fool emphatically suggested. I begrudgingly handed over my five bucks as the same fool went to make the food run for us all. The fool and his money were soon parted, in exchange for a falafel.
This thing changed me.
I could no longer keep telling myself the lie; "I DO like falafel" was all I could find when I accessed the place in my brain where I once kept it. (Then I would have a seizure from screwing around inside my brain too much.)
I've given Sarah's a five-star rating because I've never had a better falafel anywhere. I subsequently have categorized all falafel I've eaten into a three-tiered scale:
- Low-Quality Falafel (LQF), like that first instance, or the microwaved schlock they reheat for you at College Falafel.
- Medium-Quality Falafel (MQF), like those on the vegetarian plate at Cleopatra's (mmmmm), or from the unfortunately now-closed Syriandipity.
Of High Quality
Falafel, (HQF), there
Is only Sarah's
(I closed with a haiku there)