Where falafel and pizza are good for you.

LLets hear it for food you can smell across frozen parking lot, for a warm blast of garlic and spice that leads you by your stuffy nose out of a dismal December Light and past steamed-up windows into restaurant where the only message that matters is “Here, eat this. You’ll feel better.”

Such a place is TOV-LI, which is Hebrew for “good for me” and bills itself as a kosher pizza and falafel restaurant. But such Pizzas, and such falafels. Fancy, its not. TOV-LI is in an exceedingly modest little plaza on Bathurst Street. North of Finch Avenue West where the undisputed big draw is TOV-LI.

The Lineup can spill out the front door at lunch hour, and hordes of regulars who press impatiently against a glass display cases seem dauntingly certain about what they want and how they want it served, or packaged for take out.

Here’s the drill: The cash register is your first stop inside the front door. The menu is posted overhead. Think quickly. Will it be a falafel plate (falafel balls, salad, pita and hummus or eggplant, $4) a hummus plate (hummus, olive oil, parsley and tahini with pita, $4.50) or a special hummus plate (hummus, olive oil, tahini, falafel, salad and pita, $5.99)? Got it?

Pay the cashier and take your handwritten chit to the service counter to supervise the finer points of your meal. Whole-wheat pita or plain? Extra hot peppers on your double cheese cheese slice? No problem. Good luck finding a table. They’re justifiable proud of their fare’s freshness, assembling orders ala minute, popping the flaky filled pastries called bourekas (cheese, mushroom, potato or spinach. $1.75) and thin crust pizza slices form $1.87) into the warming oven for a few minutes to wake them up a bit before relinquishing them.

Request a falafel – really, you must try the falafel – and your server nicks a soft pita with the flick of a utility knife, the kind with disposable blades, and briskly stuffs it with a trio if spiced chick pea fritters, moist and chunky inside, still sizzling from the hot (fresh) oil. On top and all around the falafel balls goes a tahini-dressed mound of shopped cabbage and tomato, and for the brave, a lashing of chareef, an Israeli tomato salsa that zings hotly on the tongue.

Once the sandwich is filled to the requisite level of bursting and dripping, she folds a flimsy paper plate around it and hands it over.

Don’t even think about setting it down. Take the sheaf of napkins you’ll be offered and start eating. A falafel is $3; and half falafel, which looks more like a 75% of a falafel, is $2.

Middle Eastern spicing and the Israeli zeal for fresh veggies and salads – tabbouleh, Caesar, Greek, chef ($3 to $6) – help TOV-LI avoids the curse of blandness that sometimes afflicts strictly kosher menus.

Even a square of cheeseless pizza ($2.75), while sounding perhaps too good to have much appeal, was surprisingly flavourful.

Before I stopped counting, I tallied 10 types of finely chopped, perfectly toothsome veggies, from cauliflower to red peppers to broccoli, packed high on a chewy crust daubed with a long simmered-tomato sauce.

Garlic rules here, most notable on the addictive mouthfuls known as garlic knots (3 for $1), baked-golden bread morsels the size of a chubby thumb.

Beverages range from the usual pops and juices to imported nectars (guava, mango, $1.87) and fine frothy café lattes ($2.75) with which to wash down dessert: apple strudel ($1.95), a wedge of baklava ($2.25) or a massive date- filled cookie ($1.25), for instance.

Kosher, shmosher – this is simply good food.

Free Range, written by The Star’s Kathy Vey.

TOV-LI Pizza and Falafel
Where falafel and pizza are good for you.

NORTH Store:
5982 Bathurst Street, Toronto
416.650.9800

Hours:
Sunday – Thursday 10 am – 11 pm
Friday 10 am – 2 pm
Saturday sundown to midnight

Wheel Chair access; level entrance, washrooms downstairs.