Behold the falafel.
For vegetarians, lovers of Middle Eastern cuisine and plain old fressers, this glorious, dense packet of golf-ball-sized, spicy garbanzo bean flour, drool of sesame paste, heap of chopped vegetables and hot pita bread is one of the triumphs of the Western world, a veritable sandwich for all seasons.
Have your falafel and eat it too at Sababa, a new Israeli restaurant and de facto social club on the west side. It's easily the best falafel in the city.
I'm not sure why falafel has never caught on big-time in Vegas, the way gyros—Greek sandwiches similar to falafel if you substitute slabs of meat sliced from a vertical spit for the falafel balls—has done. In Los Angeles, where there is a huge Israeli expat community, falafels are eaten almost religiously. The only other places I know of in which to eat reliable falafel here are the Lebanese restaurant Byblos and a second Israeli restaurant, Pita Place.
Sababa's name translates as "everything is wonderful" from the Hebrew, and the restaurant makes the most of its limited kitchen facility and menu. The restaurant belongs to an enthusiastic fellow named Rami Cohen, who maintains a similar place in Boston.
The menu is limited because this is essentially a fast-food joint, Israeli style. It's the type of place you'll find literally everywhere in Israel, their version of a hamburger joint but with less cholesterol. If only our fast-food establishments served food this healthy, or tasty.
Beyond falafel, the most popular item sold here is probably shawarma, which here is a pita sandwich stuffed with rotisserie turkey marinated in paprika, cumin and coriander. The meat is piled onto a vertical broiler, just as the meat used in a gyro. The difference is this yields a far less fatty sandwich, with the meat turned out in crisp little hunks. Were you to order this sandwich anywhere in the Middle East, the meat of choice would likely be lamb. Hey, this is America. Wanna make something of it, bub?
All meat served at Sababa is glatt kosher, which the menu informs us is "a status of meat determined to be of the highest standards." This is, in fact, an incomplete definition. Glatt kosher literally means that the restaurant conforms to the strictest Jewish dietary laws and all the meats have been officially designated kosher—not just kosher style, which means no pork, shellfish, nor mixing of meat and dairy.
Then there are dishes made from chicken, eggplant and beef, all of which can be ordered in a pita sandwich or on a plate with salad, in virtually any combination you can think of, not to mention bourekas: puff-pastry turnovers stuffed with either spiced potato or spiced cooked spinach.
Kabab Yerushalmi, referring to the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, are delicious, cylindrical kababs of ground beef similar to, but smaller and less spicy than, seekh kababs sold in any of our Indian restaurants. The kababs are fine in a pita sandwich, especially good smeared with the garbanzo and sesame paste, hummus. But I prefer them on a plate, with a good helping of the house salads, and pita on the side.
Grilled chicken is fairly straightforward, cut into slices, and there is also schnitzel, a breaded cutlet with a nice, crunchy crust so grease-free that you could sit on it and not get a spot on your pants. The eggplant specialty here is baba ghannouj, a rich purée of ground sesame seeds and eggplant, available in various incarnations. Baba ghannouj is also available as a side dish, sold by weight. Either way, it's worth a try.
I mentioned that I like my kababs on a plate with the house salad, and that's true for all the meats served here. The salad is composed of lettuce, tomato, diced fresh cucumber and pickles, with red cabbage and sliced onion included optionally.
Rami throws in, at extra charge, a little hummus, which gives this fare added richness, but you have to ask for a helping of schug, an incendiary red-pepper paste from Yemen. (Schug is pronounced as if trying to perform a self-inflicted Heimlich maneuver, and is best left to the native speakers. No wonder most of us took Spanish.)
Sababa also has a variety of more pedestrian American fast-food items, such as hot dogs, hamburgers, chicken tenders and the de rigueur French fries, but these items are not the raison d'etre for visiting a place like this. The atmosphere is Spartan and the plates are plastic, but most of what you eat here is poetry, and the prices are quite fair.
I'd also like to put in a word for Israeli fruit nectars: flavors such as mango or grape, in clear plastic bottles, delicious, not too sweet and far better than soft drinks. PS: On Friday, the restaurant closes at 3 p.m. for the Sabbath and you'll probably have to forget bourekas and be content with shawarma cooked on the grill, not sliced off the spit, as they don't turn it on that day.