Hummus Place

Hummus happily belongs in my list of top 5 savoury foods. It's a niche list, but an important one. And hummus is an important inclusion. A tahini-tainted bowl of puréed chickpeas, with a splash of olive oil, and a sprinkling of paprika is something I crave worryingly regularly. 

Whenever we go back to my family home for the weekend, we know there will be a tub of Maman's homemade hummus in the fridge for us to dive in to as soon as we walk through the door. M, an amazing, genius cook who I worked with at my first London job used to make humongous bowls of fresh hummus topped with roasted chickpeas and smoked paprika. I would slather it on toast for the best ever working lunch. And then, after our trip to Honey & Co last year (how is that last year already? What happened to this year?), I dreamt about their creamy hummus for many, many nights, and spent rather too many hours recreating it from their book in the following weeks and months.

So when Molly Yeh wrote a round up of her favourite places to eat in NYC after a recent trip, I was almost packing my bags to get here months too early so that I could start eating my way through all the hummus that needed to be eaten. I resisted, but it didn't take us long to get to our first hummus stop on our New York adventure.

As it's just a hop, skip and a jump away from Washington Square Park, I went and dragged B out of the NYU library and into The Hummus Place. Two mint ice teas (something I need to recreate at home. When Summer roles around again, this is going to be the ultimate drink.) set us up for eating our way through all the hummus on the menu. And some other bits that weren't hummus, because we couldn't resist.

The hummus is magically creamy, drenched in tahini (in a good way. Obviously. Everything drenched in tahini is heavenly), sprinkled with olive oil and served up with the puffiest, fluffiest, fresh pitas. They come with various toppings, but the winners according to me where the tahini and the whole chickpea bowls. I would like to eat this every day please. And if you're as greedy as we are, the meze were also perfect: the falafel were amazingly crunchy with the herbiest interior I've ever seen; the baba ghanoush was smokey and rich; the tzatziki was zippy and zingy. The hummus dreams have returned, and I fear I'm only going to encourage them by going to the other places on my hummus list ASAP.

Hummus Place, 71 7th Ave South, New York, NY 10014