I love Falafel.

I am surprised I haven't posted much about food yet. I like good food, and Manhattan has a lot of it. But I am also a college student - therefore, I like CHEAP food. Hence, my love affair with falafel.
For those of you who aren't familiar with falafel, it is basically fried balls of ground up chickpeas or fava beans, normally put into a pita with lettuce and other vegetables. You can get tahini sauce and hot sauce on them, if you want. The really cool thing is when you look at they outside they're brown, but they're bright green on the inside.

So I really really love this place on St Mark's Place in between Cooper Square and Astor Place, called Mamoun's. For about $5.00 I get a super falafel sandwich and a drink. They have mango juice here that is the absolute best. I don't even like mangos all that much and I love it. Everything's so fresh and delicious there. It's a tiny little place, so you may have to wait for a table, but its utterly worth it, even if you eat outside. My only word of advice is to watch out for the hot sauce. I can handle most hot sauces, but even I cower in fear of this one. Imagine hot coals being massaged into your tongue, and you've got Mamoun's sauce. It's delicious though.

But I haven't been able to get down to St. Mark's lately. Not living in the city means that I have very little time to gallivant with my friends. Which makes me very very sad.  So I have begun a quest - a quest for another really excellent falafel place. This is the first place that was worth making a post over.

The other day my friends and I went to Lincoln Center and saw a food cart there, called the Casbah. This place is incredibly convenient - just hop on the M66 Westbound bus and get off when the bus leaves the park. You can take the same bus in the opposite direction to get back to Hunter. Or, you can walk it - that's always nice, provided you don't get lost in the park. (It's happened to me a couple of times.)

The falafel there is good - not exactly Mamoun's, but better than any other place I've had. It is directly across the street from the ABC studios, and a block from Lincoln Center's famous fountain. So you get food, watch the news live, and then go sit on a fancy fountain and watch the people streaming into the opera. Or, if it's cold, its half a block to the Macaulay building. You can sit on the really comfortable couches and eat it there. They're super friendly there and really relaxed about you coming and going.

The falafel is fresh and delicious, about the same price as Mamoun's. What really threw me for a loop is they put chickpeas in the pita for some reason. It doesn't make sense, but it's yummy. This place is my current falafel fix. If anyone knows of anywhere really excellent, do comment on this post and give a fellow falafel fanatic a hand.

The worst part of this post? I'm writing it from home, and now I'm hungry.
There are no falafel places in my hometown.