.Best Fast Food You’ll Want to Eat Very Slowly

Chick-O-Pea's

Fast-food fanatics don’t even want to pause long enough to sit:
Glancing up at a menu that they probably already know by heart, they
order, pay, and then get handed their bags, buckets, or boxes almost
before they’ve had a chance to blink. Die-hards eat while they walk.
Chick-O-Pea’s screws with their routine. Its specialty is falafel,
which travel guidebooks used to call Israeli hot dogs: fast food. But
here the crunchy, spicy chickpea patties come stuffed into chewy-fluffy
house-baked bread, topped with as much as thirteen different
Lebanese-style salads as you can pile on from the falafel bar, plus
lashings of tahini, and, for those who enjoy igniting their tongues,
harissa. You couldn’t eat one of these fat overflowing treasure
troves while walking, even if you wanted to. So pick a little table in
the sun. All-vegetarian and mostly vegan — owner Kamran Nassiri
became a vegetarian ten years ago — Chick-O-Pea’s also
serves soup, salads, appetizers, meatless burgers, and crisp slender
french fries with creative flavorings ranging from pesto to saffron to
jerk. Bright flavors and compelling textures await with every bite; the
falafel bar, which doubles as a salad bar, includes black-eyed-pea
relish, dilled cucumber, herbed cauliflower, hummus, jicama, tomato
salsa, peppery crinkle-cut carrots, sweet roasted beets, pickled red
onions, pickled celeriac, taratour tahini sauce, a Levantine
coleslaw, and zhoug, Yemen’s cumin-spiked answer to green salsa.

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