Paolina: What’s Vegetarian Editorial Review

Paolina is a falafel shop at 287 Bedford Ave in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and everything it serves is vegan. You don’t have to read this menu for traps. Every pita, side, and sauce on the list is plant-based, and the owners say they fry in 100% rice bran oil.

What to order at Paolina

Start with the Falafel Pita at $14.50. Paolina’s cooks grind the falafel in-house each day and stuff it into a Brooklyn-made pita. They layer it with hummus, mild zhoug, tahini, amba, a tomato-cucumber salad, sumac onion pickle, red cabbage pickle, yellow daikon pickle, cucumber pickle, and a hot shifka pepper pickle. Expect tahini on your wrists. The Infatuation’s reviewer had the same problem.

If you’d rather skip the bread, order the Falafel Salad, also $14.50, which the owners tag gluten-free. You get the same fillings as the pita, plus curly parsley.

For a sidekick, get the Black Lime French Fries at $6.50. Cooks toss them in ground, fermented black lime, a sun-dried lime common in Persian cooking. Six falafel with house tahini cost $8.50, and a Side Pita starts at $2.

For a group, Paolina sells eight-ounce mezze containers. We copied these prices from the order page:

• Hummus, $8
• Tom/Cuc Salad, $6
• Sumac Onion, $5
• Pickled Red Cabbage, $5
• Shifka Pepper, $5
• Grapefruit-Pickled Daikon, $7
• Cucumber Pickle, $7

Salt the tomato-cucumber salad yourself after pickup. Nobody salts it in the kitchen because the salad would turn watery before you got home.

The kitchen

Paolina runs a fully vegan kitchen, so you don’t have to ask about shared surfaces, dairy in the sauces, or egg in the pita. On our cross-contamination scale, that earns a 5, the safest score. With a nut or soy allergy, ask at the counter, because the owners don’t publish allergen details online.

Practical notes

You order at the counter or online for pickup through the shop’s Square page. OpenStreetMap contributors list takeaway and sidewalk seating, and The Infatuation describes eating from a beach chair out front. Treat Paolina as a quick lunch, not a sit-down dinner.

Expect to eat on the street, and expect a line when the weather is good. Greenpointers reported in July 2025 that the pitas sold out almost every day, so go early. Back then Greenpointers priced a pita at $14, and the order page now lists $14.50, so the owners have raised the price since that visit.

We couldn’t find opening hours on the shop’s own site, so we left them off. Check Instagram at @paolina.nyc before you make the trip. In October 2025, The Infatuation gave Paolina an 8.2 and tagged it good for vegetarians and cheap eats.

A pita and a side of black lime fries come to $21 before tax. That’s a solid lunch for one person. Two people can split a pita, an order of six falafel, and a container of hummus for $31.

Head to 287 Bedford Ave, order the Falafel Pita, and add the Black Lime French Fries. Eat the fries while they’re still hot.