Balls out

Vegan resto La Panthère
Verte gets falafel right

by MARK SLUTSKY

To me, falafel is a lot like pizza: all-time classic fast food, easy to eat with only one hand and, in theory, generally cheap and difficult to mess up. That is, unless you live in Montreal, where good examples of both are exceedingly difficult to come across. Montreal’s heartbreaking situation for pizza aficionados is well-documented, but our falafel-lovers too have long suffered in silence. Most Middle-Eastern fast food joints pre-fry their balls and let them sulk under heat lamps for hours, then wrap them up in a pita with their toppings and warm them in a sandwich press. The result is dispiriting: soft, unevenly heated falafel balls forced into intimate contact with warm, soggy iceberg lettuce.

So when I heard that La Panthère Verte, a new vegan restaurant on St-Viateur in the heart of the Mile-End café zone, boasted fresh and tasty falafels, I had to check it out. Now, I have to say right away that vegan restaurants are not so much my thing. I pretty much have a deeply ingrained resistance to everything about them: the mealy food, the West Coast aesthetic, the invariably stoned and poor service. Yeah, I’m generalizing, but once upon a time, I was a vegetarian and spent way too much time in these places. I also eat a lot more meat than you’d expect from a former veggie; I even own a meat slicer.

But my love of falafel was enough to get me to overcome this longstanding prejudice. I’ve been eating the stuff all my life but, no surprise here, the best deep-fried chickpea balls I’ve ever had had to be on a trip to Israel. As it turns out, Chaim, the man behind the falafels at La Panthère Verte, is an Israeli native. So I felt I was in good hands.

The restaurant definitely has all the Vancouver-style vegetarian restaurant visual cues: painted vines on the walls, lots of plants, a long table with little cacti planters in the middle, fair trade teas for sale, The Book of Tofu on a side shelf, ready for perusal. And yet… I was cool with it. It feels bright, friendly. The salads look fresh. The staff are cheerful and alert.

Sandwiches are in the $6–$7 range, with an extra $5 or so for a plate with salad and an organic soft drink. Let’s start with the falafel ($5.99), which was made to order (crucial!). The balls were fresh, hot, perhaps not as crunchy as I like but perfectly tasty. They were topped with copious tahini (sesame sauce), diced cucumbers and peppers and a big scoop of sauerkraut, interestingly enough. Verdict: a little health-foody, but pretty darn good. The accompanying salads, sweet potato, quinoa and some regular greens and sprouts, were fresh as well and a nice complement. Alternatives to falafel, presented similarly, are the tofu steak (with shredded beets and carrots and fresh spinach, $5.99), tempeh ($6.99) and a veggie burger ($6.99).

And if you like healthy juices and smoothies, this is the spot for you. Honestly, I can’t imagine anyone liking wholesome beverages as much as these guys. Their juice/smoothy menu fills two full pages. The “SmoothiVore” section features
drinks like the Mowgli’s Delight (made with celery, kale, cucumber, parsley and banana—an odd one) and the BalooBerry (blueberry, banana, almond essence, rice milk). All smoothies, $6 each, are sweetened with agave. Juice blends, also $6 each, include the likes of Green Fuel (kale, cucumber, celery, parsley, apple) and ABC (apple, beet, carrot). Weirdly, they claim all their juices are made with some sort of magical juicer that uses magnets to somehow, uh, extract valuable nutrients or something.

You can also enhance your drinks with shots of stuff like echinacea, nettle, ginseng, mace… the list goes on. You’re not walking out of this place without some serious natural-ingredient-derived superpowers, that’s for sure.

I’ll give it to the Panthère Verte people. They’re running a vegan restaurant I’m actually looking forward to returning to, and that’s no small thing.