Fava Pot

I was trying hard to pick a familiar, cheap-eats type spot for dinner tonight but, as I do many other nights, I came up blank for ideas and, being the very tech-savvy and in-the-know person I am, ended up googling “restaurants” to help me remember what existed in my immediate environs. After rejecting a dozen places (and being rejected by the ones that refuse to stay open for dinner), I found out about Fava Pot, a food truck-turned-Real Boy with two brick and mortars, one in Falls Church, and the other inside Union Market. Perfect!

So my best effort at a “let’s be healthy and get something small and cheap” Sunday dinner quickly devolved as I perused Fava Pot’s menu. Did I really need an appetizer and a dessert? I mean…kinda. Get ready.

This is the gollash. It’s like a shepherd’s pie had a love child with a spanakopita (fyi, this is not the last time I will be comparing Fava Pot’s food to similar foods from other cuisines). Fava Pot calls this an “appetizer.” It is a full 9×9 pie. The edges were crispy from the oven, the phyllo was buttery, the inside was full of Egyptian spices. It was the happiest of mistakes, but is it an appetizer? You be the judge.

I got two sandwiches to share, though “sandwich” is a very broad and generous term in both cases. Specifically for my husband, I ordered the hawashei: basically a lamb/beef quesadilla (told you). It’s flat and crunchy, and the meat inside has a distinct flavor of cinnamon. It came with a spicy tahini dipping sauce, which is always a win in my mind. The dish overall had a strong, almost smokey flavor that my husband compared (weirdly favorably) to cigarette smoke. For myself, I got the fava bean sandwich to balance the large amount of ground meat in the other dishes. I’d hate to disappoint you, so I will say that it is quite reminiscent of a bean burrito–messy and mushy and savory with a soft outside. We had leftovers of everything, although TBH I might go eat the rest of that phyllo pie after I finish writing.

Fava Pot has a variety of desserts that I unwisely decided to peruse. That’s when I saw the words: NUTELLA. KUNAFA. Nutella kunafa?! What witchcraft is this?! It’s like if your two favorite bands announced that they had decided to combine into one, giant super band. My gut told me it was a bad idea, but my gut also told me it wanted nutella kunafa inside it, and who was I to argue? If you thought that maybe the dessert would be a reasonable size, you would be laughably wrong. As I probably should have predicted, it was very sweet. Perhaps due to transportation but possibly due to large amount of nutella goo and syrup, the crust was not as hard and crunchy as I wished for. I probably would have preferred the regular cheese kunafa. Honestly, your two favorite bands put together would probably also not be very good either.

Price: $20 per person.

Bottom line: Fava Pot gets a giant thumbs up from me, and it’s good to know that they pack a lot of bang for your buck. Learn from my mistakes and be judicious about how much food you buy, despite everything sounding ridiculously delicious.