Falafel Temple — Restaurant in Bali

New place with massive potential, not fully reached. here is why:

The website slogan “your pita prayers have been answered” is essentially the potential summed up. Canggu doesn’t have a great middle eastern falafel place - not that I know of. And who doesn’t like hummus...

Speaking of hummus. There are a few key things you have to nail in a middle eastern restaurant: falafel, baba ganoush and most importantly hummus. We had the massive mezze plate and Falafel Tempel has great falafel, tasty baba ganoush but the hummus was off. Not citric but sparkly. The same goes for the Arabic salad. The other stuff was good. Now, that leaves a first impression of “the food quality is not consistent throughout the menu” which is a deal breaker for further visits. I don’t want to hope for good food. I want to be 100% sure.

In addition it’s very pricey. The mezze plate costs 100k. If everything had been spot on, I would consider stopping by once in a while if the hummus desire was irresistible. However, 80k would be a more appropriate pricing considering other restaurants with similar quality and ambition.

The rest was the usual: friendly staff, nice interior and concept, great Marketing pics. But, at its core a restaurant is about food, not about furniture. This is why you see rocked down warungs with queues.

I really...

Nice interior design, friendly staff, comfortable seats with comfy throw pillows, free water. The service is very slow (literally slow, staffs didn’t even try to work, haven’t seen anything like that in Canggu before) and there were only two tables busy, so be ready to wait. The food is good and fresh but portions are small (and I’m not talking about the mezze plate, I’m talking about regular plates like hummus, it looks bigger in commercial pictures for Insta and google but not in reality). So you pay more than in Europe for smaller portions in Bali but I understand that it’s difficult to ship ingredients to Bali so prices are still reasonable to me. Btw, make sure you have cash, there no card payments accepted. The food is good (not great!, I liked falafel the most) and hummus was not mixed properly because in the middle of the bowl I tasted like a teaspoon size tahini paste, and I think it’s not acceptable. If you order hummus you should taste hummus and not tahini which is one of the ingredients used for hummus. So that was surprising considering how slow the service was. I hope Falafel Temple will work on the service and make the food taste better, I understand that is not easy to run a business like that in Bali, but if you do you have to make sure you...

I used to eat here at least 2-3 x a month for a year or two as this is one of my favorite cafe in canggu. Stopped eating here since Feb 20, the covid pandemic. Back again today as i missed the food here. However I was disappointed as none of the staff wore mask, there were 3 staffs. I asked if they wore mask when preparing food, the staff said the kitchen staff would wear mask. So one of the staff took a mask from their locker and wore it. After they served my food, the kitchen staff took off the mask and kept working in the kitchen. Almost all food here is raw, just the falafel is fried. For me, regardless covid pandemic or not, wearing a mask while preparing food especially not fresh cooked food ( like salad, sandwich, etc ) is a mandatory. People spit saliva when talking, it will drop on the food and eaten by the customer. Wearing mask when preparing food, especially for raw food, it’s a respect to the customer……… Maybe this is just...