Review: At Falafel House, a Hertel family restaurant for a new generation

Palestinian and Syrian mainstays plus American blue-collar cooking offers value to every diner

A table full of value at Falafel House.

For more than a century, Buffalonians have found what they wanted at 1150 Hertel Ave.

In the late 1920s, as McGarry’s Place, “dry agents” raided it several times to enforce Prohibition laws, resulting in the arrests of the owners and at least one police officer, charged with helping steal three barrels of beer.

In the 1964, as The New Hertel Inn, it was the place for $2.50 T-bone steak dinners seven days a week, and “the ‘unpredictable’ Jiggy Gelia at the piano bar” every day but Monday.

A few years later, as The Talisman, it offered the “piano stylings of Buffalo’s own Mike Breen,” with “your hostesses Muffy King and Janice Becker.”

Today’s generation knows 1150 Hertel Ave. as a hummus haven, not a piano palace.