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An atlas of one route · 1,462 stops · Metula to Eilat

In case you wanted to visit every falafel place in Israel

Every place in two open map datasets that is named or tagged as falafel, plus every hummus place, and the shawarma and Middle Eastern spots where falafel is almost always on the menu. One short path visits each of them once. Pick a map style, scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan, and hover a dot for its name.

Plate 1 · 1,462 stops
1,462 stops · 3,499 km
Press play to ride the route
Falafel or hummus place (805)Shawarma or Middle Eastern spot (657)
1,462places on the route1
805with falafel or hummus in the name, or a falafel category1
3,499 kmby road, stop to stop
731 daysat two stops a day, lunch and dinner

Made in public by Yonatan Gross

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A few facts for the road

Falafel is widely recognized as a national dish in Israel, and it is also claimed by Palestinians and other Arab cooks across the region.3

It was not yet that popular at independence. Rationing from 1949 helped, because chickpeas were cheap protein that everyone could get.3

The falafel-in-pita sandwich spread in the 1950s, popularized by Jewish refugees from Yemen, according to food historian Gil Marks.3

This is still an undercount. Open map data misses many small stands, and we found no official national count to quote. The second group is an inference from the place type, not a checked menu. The route was solved with the LKH heuristic, so it is very good but not proven shortest. Distances follow the roads, though the order of stops was solved on straight-line distance.

Sources

  1. Places, Overture Maps Foundation, Places theme, release 2026-09-23.1 (CDLA Permissive 2.0 and ODbL sources). Kept: address country Israel, operating status open, confidence of at least 0.5.
  2. Places, © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), queried through the Overpass API on 10 Oct 2026, inside OSM's Israel boundary. The two datasets were merged and places within 60 m of each other were counted once.
  3. Matching: falafel, פלאפל or فلافل in the name, or a falafel category, plus hummus (חומוס, حمص) in the name. Second group: shawarma, sabich or kebab in the name, or a Middle Eastern restaurant category. Cafés, pizza and burger places are left out.
  4. Falafel, Wikipedia, the "In Israel" section and the sources it cites.
  5. Map styles: Streets, Light, Dark and Satellite tiles by Esri (Streets, Light and Dark sources include Esri, HERE, Garmin, USGS and OpenStreetMap contributors; imagery by Vantor and Earthstar Geographics; the GIS user community). The map credits each style's exact sources in its corner. The offline Atlas style uses Natural Earth 1:10m data and place names from Overture Maps divisions; its dashed line marks the Natural Earth boundary of the Palestinian territories. Map engine: Leaflet.
  6. Road route: driving directions between each pair of stops from OSRM on OpenStreetMap data (ODbL), fetched on 10 Oct 2026.
  7. Format inspired by @Rainmaker1973's pizza route through Italy.