Restaurant review: Umi Falafel serves up fine falafel fare - and a generous helping of joy

Umi Falafel on Academy Street

• Umi Falafel
• 11/12 Academy Street, Cork, T12 T381
• Tel [phone] 
• www.umifalafel.ie/location/academy-st-cork/
• Open 7 days from 11:00 to 21:00

FOR years in the hospitality world, “pizza, pasta, burgers” has been dismissive shorthand for a class of uninspired mid-range offering where business model is all about volume and high turnover, and originality, imagination and creativity are best left to Picasso or Pixar.

Certainly, there are more than a few establishments around the country specialising in any one of that trio to an extraordinarily high standard but warning signs can start flashing whenever you encounter two or, more alarming still, all three on the same menu.

These middle of the road cafés, pubs and restaurants don’t specialise in any particular cuisine or refine their own superior take on a classic dish but instead offer pastiches too often a depressing travesty of the real thing.

Mind you, it is on these menus where you can best take the temperature of the mainstream Irish dining audience’s current appetites. It’s how you come to realise that, along with pizza-pasta-burgers, we are apparently weak for Thai chicken curry, or at least a dodgy facsimile of same. And how do we like our salmon overcooked? We like it overcooked cajun style!

Now it seems they’re coming for a personal favourite — falafel.

Falafel bites at Umi Falafel, Cork

In recent times I’ve noticed a ‘falafel’ dish creeping onto on all sorts of otherwise sub-standard menus as the token ‘vegetarian offering’. It’s understandable. Falafel is one of the great ‘fast foods’ of global cuisine, one I’ve been obsessed with since first eating it in Middle Eastern/Levantine restaurants in London in the 80s. As a recovering vegetarian who never quite kicked the habit entirely, now a flexitarian, it is a truly delicious meat-free dish in a time when they should be ever more prevalent in our diets.

So, rather than bemoan its possible downgrading in status, we decide to go out in search of the real deal. (Well, we’re also hungry and I don’t have time to cook.) We already know the falafel in The Four Liars, in Shandon, from Syrian chef/proprietor Ahmed Saqqa is superb so our ‘research’ takes us elsewhere, to Umi Falafel, owned by a Dublin Palestinian family, with five outlets in the capital and one each in Belfast and Cork.

The Cork outpost is on Academy Street, directly across from the premises where this esteemed organ was published for 165 years until it finally moved out in 2006. Back then, all I remember across the road was the tobacconist. (I know! Gather around, children, ’til I recount a tale most fantastical of a time when whole emporia were devoted to the purveyance of lung cancer and emphysema!)

BUT the former Examiner and Echo offices are now swish apartments and the once scruffy street is infinitely smarter. Umi falafel — with the very decent Lovin’ Salads alongside — has certainly improved the street’s ‘wellness’ offering.

The interior is ‘minimalist-canteen’ or even just ‘canteen’ but it’s all about the atmosphere: the polyglottal hum of a contented young crowd from all corners of the globe is a fair reflection of an ongoing and wonderful evolution of Cork as a buzzing, multi-cultural little city. 

What’s more, these young diners are happily socialising with nary a drop of alcohol in sight — yes, there are even a few of yoga mats hanging from chairs — and the vibe is friendly and welcoming, further enhanced by quite charming staff.

I am here for falafel and falafel only but, professional obligations to the fore, order a host of other dishes, bar various halloumi offerings which feels too much like ballast on a night I seek the eternal lightness of being or at least a less than bloated belly.

Fatoush.

Fatoush salad is chunks of tomatoes, peppers, cucumber, and lettuce, rocket and scallions, sharply dressed in vibrant lemon, olive oil, parsley, mint and pomegranate molasses but golden squares of ‘toasted’ bread are in fact pitta fried to tooth-threatening density and we pluck them out like weeds.

Hummus is a good, though perhaps too smooth and loose, nutty paste, with an undertow of garlic and cumin. Baba ghanoush is better, fire roasted aubergine flesh pulverised to near emulsion but still holding toothsome texture; acrid smokiness and tart fruity notes are amplified by a generous sprinkling of sumac.

Cauliflower fritters are potent fried florets, throbbing with earthy cumin and tahini but parsley and pomegranate seeds can’t leaven the overall heft and they’re near enough a meal in their own right, too heavy as a side.

Veggie triangles are very average samosas, while spinach filo rolls are ‘ascetic’, plain steamed spinach in rock-hard filo pastry — I adore spinach but a dip doesn’t come with this dish, and if ever a foodstuff needed to be dredged til near drowned in something both moist and savoury, it is these culinary equivalents of running up and down Croagh Patrick twice in the bare feet. Decent stuffed vine leaves are a guilty pleasure, one of my favourite ways of eating rice, and Umi’s Batata Hara, spiced potato wedges, are divine, crisped on gently spiced exterior, sweet, fluffy and steaming heart within.

A falafel pocket.

But, let’s cut to the chase — falafel. We order it two ways: Palestinian Fafafel (great value at €7.50), in flatbread pocket with hummus, tomato, cucumber pickles, fried aubergines, flat parsley, chilli and tahini sauce; and Lebanese Falafel (€7), with tomato, cucumber pickles, flat parsley and tahini sauce.

The falafel themselves are good. Pleasing, crunchy exterior with a soft green heart zinging with spice: earthy cumin, sweet cinnamon, feisty chilli, astringent garlic and green herbaceous coriander, all feting the nutty grated chickpea. The Palestinian assemblage is tasty but I prefer the elemental simplicity of the Lebanese, allowing more room for the star performer to find centre stage and strut its stuff.

It is certainly food made for wine but I am writhing in the throes of dry ‘Jabruary’ (a late kickoff in January extending into February) so beverage of choice is very fine Sisú organic kombucha, from Limerick, blueberry for me and ginger for SpouseGirl, while La Daughter quaffs a lemonade.

We’re in and out in an hour, but the glow of satisfaction and inner wellbeing derived from both food and atmosphere is a tonic that invigorates the remainder of the evening. Four Liars still holds the Leeside falafel crown for this particular diner but next time I’m too lazy to cook, I’ll be back into vegetarian/vegan Umi Falafel in a heartbeat, soaking up the ambience and wolfing down a portion of genuine and delicious falafel, just as it’s supposed to be made.

The Verdict

• Food: 8.5 for the falafel (6.5 for the rest, a ‘mixed bag’)
• Service: 8
• Value: 9
• Atmosphere: 8
• Tab: €82.25 (excluding tip; far more food than needed)