Two friends, out of work 20 years ago, opened falafel restaurant in Iowa City

IOWA CITY — Naftaly Stramer and Ofer Sivan have been selling falafel in Iowa City almost as long as they’ve known how to make it.

Their restaurant, Oasis Falafel at 206 N. Linn St., is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. It opened in the fall of 2004, just a few months after the owners learned how to make the Mediterranean street food.

“The first batch that we tried to do, it all disintegrated. I remember my wife was looking at me like, ‘Are you serious? This is what you want to do? You don’t even know how to do falafel.’ But, you know, we fixed it,” Stramer said.

The idea for the restaurant started in 2003. Sivan had just graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in electrical engineering, and Stramer had recently lost his job as a computer engineer.

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Both men were born in Israel. Sivan moved to the United States with his family as a child and grew up in Iowa City and Chicago. Stramer grew up in Israel, where he earned his engineering degree before moving to Colorado and then to Iowa City.

Stramer had been living in Iowa City for almost 10 years when he and Sivan had their first conversation about falafel.

They were talking with Sivan’s brother on the Iowa City Ped Mall when someone mentioned the lack of authentic Mediterranean food in Iowa City. They wished there was a falafel place in the area, and Sivan’s brother suggested that Sivan and Stramer — who were both looking for jobs at the time — open a falafel restaurant.

“I was basically laughing, like, what do I know about falafel, or business? Well, business, I knew, but what do I know about restaurants?” Stramer said. “But, I don’t know. It somehow penetrated our minds.”

“It just seemed like a good idea” Sivan added.

Getting started

It took about a year to get the restaurant off the ground. Neither Stramer, now 69, nor Sivan, now 46, had ever made falafel before, but they experimented, with feedback from friends and family, until they settled on a recipe.

“I actually got another job, with a small company,” Stramer said. “I remember telling the founder over there that I was happy to help grow the company, but I said, ‘I’m not sure I will survive here more than a year because I have falafel in my head.’ ”

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They tested their falafel at a couple of arts festivals, wanting to see if the food would sell. They sold out and soon bought a building on North Linn Street to open Oasis.

“From right away, people were super supportive,” Sivan said.

Now, 20 years later, the restaurant sells more in an hour than the two sold at those first festivals, Sivan said.

The business opened a second Oasis in Omaha in 2018 but had to close it in 2022 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Iowa City restaurant closed for 10 weeks during the pandemic, but the business was able to hang on through its hummus sales to grocery stores.

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Hummus sales

Sivan and Stramer began selling hummus to local stores a few years after they opened Oasis when customers started asking it they could buy the hummus, which was served alongside the falafel.

“I think a lot of people don’t know that hummus can taste good because the only widely available ones have a lot of preservatives, and it’s not really a fresh product,” Sivan said.

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Sivan and Stramer had heard that the Hy-Vee grocery store was trying to work more closely with local food producers, so they reached out to the manager of the Hy-Vee on North Dodge Street. The manager had heard about Oasis from his daughter, who loved the restaurant, and soon the entrepreneurs were producing containers of fresh hummus to send to the grocer.

They soon expanded to other grocery stores, including other Hy-Vee locations, New Pioneer Co-op, Costco, Natural Grocers and Fareway, as well as selling to the University of Iowa dining halls.

Eventually, they were invited to a meeting in Des Moines at Hy-Vee’s corporate headquarters, where the grocery chain asked if they’d be willing to increase their production and sell their hummus at grocery stores around the Midwest. Stramer and Sivan happily agreed.

The expansion took some time. They connected with a distributor warehouse near Kalona, where the hummus could be made on a much larger scale than what was possible in the Oasis kitchen. The expanded production was up and running in early 2020 — fortunate timing for the business, given the onset of COVID.

The manufacturing location was allowed to stay open, and hummus sales carried the business through the pandemic, allowing the restaurant to open again once quarantine restrictions were lifted.

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Making hummus in a separate location also meant its shelf life could increase from one week to just over two weeks while maintaining the same recipe, without excessive preservatives.

Two weeks still is a somewhat short shelf life and some stores worry about the hummus going bad before it sells, but Sivan said the fresh taste is what makes the difference.

“Groceries are skeptical. They think it goes bad so fast nobody will buy it, or it will never sell. But that’s why people like it,” Sivan said. “It’s like eating a canned peach and a peach. It’s not even the same thing. Sure, one will last for a year, but it doesn’t really taste like the real thing.”

The two owners said they hope to continue expanding the market for hummus sales, but the restaurant itself will likely remain an Iowa City exclusive.

Comments: (319) 398-8328; emily.andersen@thegazette.com