Cox: King Falafel flavorful, inexpensive

Falafel shops are as ubiquitous in the Middle East as McDonald’s are in this country. But we’re getting more of them in Sonoma County.

We have the Awful Falafel Food Truck in Santa Rosa, and falafel shops in Cotati and Petaluma. And there’s King Falafel in Sebastopol, where you get Katti Allati’s Jordanian version of this fried chickpea patty. According to some who have traveled through the Middle East, it’s indistinguishable from those served in Israel and Lebanon.

They are vegan and gluten-free, if that matters to you, and very nutritious. To make them, ground soaked chickpeas are mixed with onion, garlic, parsley, flour (or bulghur), coriander, black and cayenne pepper, cardamom and, very prominently in the aroma and flavor, cumin. Balls about the size of walnuts are dropped into high-heat oil and deep fried to a dark brown. This gives a crunchy outer shell filled with a steaming, spicy interior.

At King Falafel, there are four ways you can order them: as a dinner plate with hummus, tabbouleh, and pita bread; drizzled with tahini on top of a salad of tomato, lettuce, cucumber, and eggplant; as a clutch of six falafels by themselves; or as a sandwich where they are stuffed into a pita or lavash bread with your choice of hummus, tomato, lettuce, eggplant, pickles, tahini sauce, and shatta. Shatta is the Sriracha of the region, a Middle Eastern hot sauce.

Our table went for the Falafel Plate ($8.99 **). Five falafels, green inside from the parsley, are served with hummus, tabbouleh, and pita bread. The best part of the plate was the falafels themselves, well made, properly cooked, and tasty with cumin, coriander, and cardamom. The other items on the plate were odd. The hummus had no garlic and no little valley made with the back of a spoon where some good olive oil should go. The tabbouleh was a mix of coarsely chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, and parsley, but no bulghur and no mint. Tabbouleh without bulghur and mint isn’t tabbouleh, it’s chopped salad. The pita was commercial, but had the virtue of being fresh.

The Gyro Plate ($9.99 ***) was the hit of the night. We chose beef, rather than lamb or chicken, but both of the latter are available if you prefer. Gyro is pronounced yeer-o by the Greeks, who invented a vertical spit of stacked meat in Mycenaean and Minoan times and lay claim to the modern sandwich, although the Turks make the same sandwich that they call doner. The folks at King Falafel call it geer-o. And many Americans call it djeer-o or jye-ro. No matter what you call it, it’s a delectable bit of business.

The beef is thinly sliced and lots of it is bundled into a pita bread with tomato, onion, and a pour of creamy cool tzatziki sauce. It’s a sloppy, messy thing, but that’s part of the fun.

Another sloppy menu item (and that’s not meant as a pejorative) is the Lebni Sandwich ($5.99 ***). Lebni is also called kefir cheese or Lebanese yogurt. It’s richer and creamier than Greek yogurt, more the consistency of sour cream but less bitter. It’s made with live probiotic cultures, so it’s super nutritious. Here it’s rolled in a lavash wrapper with tomato, cucumber, mint, and za’atar. Za’atar is a generic name for a spice blend made with herbs that have a flavor profile in the thyme-savory-oregano range. The herbs are mixed with ground sumac berries and sesame seeds. It’s used everywhere in the Middle East.

Six Dolmas ($4.99 **) were grape leaves stuffed with rice, lemon, onion, and herbs and steam-baked in a dutch oven, and then chilled. They were okay but bland. Two Chicken Kabob Skewers ($4.99 ** ½) were grilled cubes of flavorful, tender chicken on bamboo sticks and were warmly welcomed.

If you just want to stay home in America, they serve ground beef and ground chicken burgers, too.

Along one wall are shelves stocked with Middle Eastern food products - tubs of the clarified butter called ghee, chili paste, canned hummus, canned baba ghanoush (a cooked eggplant dish), and other items that are wonderful when home-made but maybe less so canned.

There’s no beer or wine, so there’s tea and soft drinks. This is an Arab-style restaurant; alcoholic drinks are not halal in those lands.

To sum up: An inexpensive but good way to discover Middle Eastern food.

Jeff Cox writes a weekly restaurant review for the Sonoma Living section. He can be reached at jeffcox@sonic.net.