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Food guide

How to find good falafel

Falafel has a short half-life. It is excellent for about four minutes after it leaves the fryer and mediocre after twenty, which means the single most important question is whether it was fried when you ordered it.

What separates a good one from a bad one

  • Fried to order — Three to four minutes' wait. Falafel sitting in a warming tray is dense and dry, and no amount of tahini rescues it.
  • Green inside — Soaked dried chickpeas blended with a lot of parsley, cilantro and herbs. If the interior is beige, it is short on herbs or made from a dry mix.
  • Soaked, never cooked, chickpeas — The chickpeas are soaked raw and ground. Using cooked chickpeas or canned makes a paste that falls apart in the oil — a common shortcut.
  • A crisp, craggy shell — Rough surface, shatters when bitten. Smooth uniform spheres came from a scoop and a mix.
  • Tahini made in house — Thinned with lemon and water to a pourable cream. Thick, bitter tahini straight from the jar is a tell.

What to order

  • A falafel sandwich — In pita or laffa, with salad, pickles, tahini and hot sauce.
  • A falafel plate — With hummus, salads and bread. Better for judging the components.
  • Ask for them fresh — At a busy place this costs you four minutes and is always worth it.
  • Sabich as an alternative — Fried aubergine, egg, amba and tahini in pita. Same counters, often better.
  • Amba, if offered — Pickled mango sauce. Divisive and excellent.

Where to find falafel

Open listings put 229 falafel shops across the US. These are the cities and campuses with the most of them.

Cities with the most

New York, NY 33 Chicago, IL 8 Washington, DC 6 Los Angeles, CA 6 San Francisco, CA 5 Philadelphia, PA 5 Seattle, WA 4 San Jose, CA 4 Boston, MA 4 Portland, OR 3 Long Beach, CA 3

Campuses with the most within a mile

Baruch 14 The New School 12 FIT 12 NYU 11 CUNY Graduate Center 11 Touro University 10 Hunter 4 BMCC 4 University of San Francisco 3 Pace University 3

A few to start with

Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.

How Savor Scout looks for it

Falafel searches weight fried-to-order mentions above everything else, including overall rating, because freshness is the dominant variable in this dish. Reviews describing a green interior or a wait are treated as positives.

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Looking in a particular city?

Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.

All 1,000 cities →

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