The Best Falafel in Melbourne

ST GEORGES ROAD, MELBOURNE— With notable attractions like Bell Street Maccas, the Subway-KFC duopoly on Normanby Road and a couple of scattered pizza shops, the inner-city highway stretching from Fitzroy to the bowels of the city’s northern suburbs isn’t known as a food destination. Or at least, it wasn’t until Wazzup Falafel arrived.

On a plot of concrete skirting the 70 km/h hooning strip nested in what appears to be a former petrol station, an unassuming food truck run by Ahmad Alalaea serves the best falafel in Melbourne.

Alalaea, a Palestinian refugee who grew up in Jordan, migrated to Australia in 2017. At the time he was a practising personal trainer with a master’s degree in health and physical education. He told VICE he never thought he’d end up in the food industry, but after a short time living in Melbourne, he found himself missing falafels from home.

“Falafels are very common in Jordan and Palestine, we eat them on a daily basis,” he told VICE. 

“My brother-in-law took me to a few places he said had the best falafels in Melbourne and they were nowhere close to the falafels I was used to.”

So Alalaea decided he would be the one to make the best falafel in Melbourne. 

He travelled back to Jordan in 2019 and spent time working at falafel restaurants to learn the traditional recipes of his homelands to bring back. When he returned to Melbourne, Wazzup Falafel was born. 

Although Melbourne is rich with falafel restaurants that serve iterations from Lebanon Egypt and many other parts of the Middle East, Wazzup Falafel is one of the city’s only diners to serve the Jordanian-Palestinian version. Alalaea said the difference is the unique spices available in Palestine for which he travels regularly to Jordan, where his family still lives, to collect. 

Opening during the pandemic wasn’t easy, Alalaea said, especially when Victoria’s lockdown laws restricted movement to a five-kilometre radius from home. Thankfully, aside from being fucking delicious, Wazzup Falafel is wholly vegan, and the crunchy inner north suburbs of Preston, Northcote and Thornbury are full of environmentally inclined youth with proclivities for veganism. It was a stroke of fortune and word caught on about Wazzup fast. 

At Wazzup Falafel, the care and love Alalaea puts into his food is obvious. 

In addition to staple dishes like falafel wraps, hummus and pitas, the Wazzup Falafel menu includes three dishes of Alalaea’s own: a unique stuffed falafel – crisp, nutty balls filled with onions fried with sumac; Mussbaha – a take on a Levant classic made with whole and smoothly blended chickpeas with tahini; and fatteh – fried pita covered with tahini sauce and drizzled with an insanely delicious herb oil, fried sliced almonds and chickpeas.

“You won’t find Mussbaha, stuffed falafel or Fatteh anywhere else but Wazzup Falafel,” Alalaea said proudly. 

Dip the stuffed falafel into the Fatteh and weep with sheer pleasure.

It is with joy and excitement to share the food of his culture that Alalaea conducts his business. Everything from the pickles to the herbed sauce drizzled over the Fatteh is made fresh. 

“I wake up at 4 am, I pray, then I start to prepare the falafel.”

[Wazzup Falafel has now moved just slightly up the road, to 56-58 Oakover Road, Preston, follow them on Instagram here]

Arielle Richards is the multimedia reporter at VICE Australia, follow her on Instagram and Twitter.