Dining Out: Veg*n Shawarma (West Jerusalem)

Grad school is a time suck. Due to time and budget constraints, you don't get to cook truly interesting things and are mostly relegated to keeping inexpensive recipes in heavy rotation. You sure as hell don't have the money to eat out. Sometimes, though, you get to mix pain and pleasure, and go on a research practicum to Israel/Palestine that includes meals. Initially, you think that finding food to eat will be easy, and you love falafel, so why obsessively plan on how to find specifically veg*n restaurants?

Well, I personally found the falafel in Israel to be lacking--little spice and no herbs. Putting fries in the pita was a welcomed texture change and the local style of pickles were interesting (although not salty enough to suit me). I also became sick to death of eating meze in a kebab-centric culture, as well as tired of only being able to get fire roasted veggies without any seasoning, salt, or general complexity to the "dish." (Simple meals are nice, but I consider a plate of veggies to be a plate of ingredients that need further preparation.)

The Israeli Vegan Diet Guide makes it clear that there are a number of options in Israel, but I was busy with my research project, and didn't have the time to check anything out. Again, grad school = time suck. At the end of the stint there, I did have a day "off" (part of which was supposed to be spent typing up my notes) that a teammate suggested we use to visit a veg*n restaurant in West Jerusalem.

Thus I visited Vegetarian Shawarma for a much needed change of pace. They have a website, but it's only in Hebrew, so I made sure to take a picture of the English menu:

Vegan Schnitzel on Baguette -- The patty was nicely firm, but obviously something you get frozen. (This is technically a fast food restaurant, after all.) The only thing it needed was a bit more sauce, and there was mustard on the table, the taste of which I hadn't had in ages. Gobbled down the whole sandwich.

"Nuggets" -- As my dining companion remarked, it's a very interesting concept of nugget. The thinner pieces were like eating the fried crust off of a morsel of food--and I'm not even remotely complaining about that, since I miss doing so. The thicker pieces were more meat-like and the crust had a good herbed/peppered flavor to it.