Falafel Station Was Already Good, but Its New Home (and Menu) Is Great

When regulars started jokingly complaining that they couldn’t bring their families to sit down and enjoy a meal at Falafel Station in Prospect, Mazen and Sahar El-Baba knew it was time to scale up. After all, sharing food with loved ones is what Lebanese culture is all about, Sahar tells Broadsheet. “Their feedback really gave us encouragement to do something different,” she says. So, after almost two years in their small shop, the husband-and-wife duo set out to expand both their floor space and their menu.

Several months on, the restaurant’s second iteration opened on Magill Road in St Morris, with capacity to seat 65 patrons – plus a big woodfired oven and a dishwasher. “We didn’t even have one of those before,” says Sahar.

The new space is bright and airy. The fit-out invites you to linger for casual and comfortable meals. The space includes a dark wooden bookshelf displaying tableware, kids’ books, faded French cookbooks and Mazen’s framed diploma.

While the old menu scratched the surface of Lebanese food, the new one showcases the depth of the El-Babas’ native cuisine. There’s shakshuka; house-made sausages; chickpeas with yoghurt, bread crisps and almonds (fatteh); kofta; falafel; crispy woodfired flatbread (manoush) with more than 12 topping options (Sahar’s pick is za’atar). Plus, there are specials like the Lebanese burger with pickled vegetables and hot chips inside, and sweet bites to pair with coffee. Dessert is not to be skipped. Mazen’s family owns Albaba Sweets, a popular confectionery company, so he knows a thing or two about baklava, knafeh and namoura (semolina cake).

“Everything here is exactly how you’ll see it in Lebanon,” says Sahar. “When people ask for something that’s not really traditional, like to put garlic sauce with the falafel, I encourage them to try it our way first, and if they don’t like it, to come back and order what they want. They always come back and say, ‘You were right!’”

When Mazen and Sahar moved to Australia from Saudi Arabia (where they’d lived since leaving Lebanon in 2013) with their 11- and 14-year-old sons, Sahar tells Broadsheet they were “very afraid to take the step” of opening a restaurant, despite decades of hospitality experience. “We knew nothing about Australia. We were very well known where we were, and in Lebanon, and here we didn’t know anyone. That’s why we started small with Prospect. We said, ‘We will see how it goes’ … and it went very well.”

Falafel Station
405 Magill Road, St Morris
0422 278 877

Hours:
Mon to Fri 8am–4pm
Sat 8am–8pm
Sun 8am–3pm

@falafelstation.sa