South Tampa vegan restaurant offers healthy Middle Eastern cuisine

Mediterranean Chickpea in Tampa

The vegan restaurant in South Tampa offers Middle Eastern cuisine.

TAMPA, Fla. - Having a life-long passion for creating fresh food helped Mouna Alchabad transition from a successful catering business to a brick-and-mortar restaurant back in 2018.

That hard work creating the Mediterranean Chickpea has now been recognized nationally, as Yelp has recently ranked them as the #1 vegan eatery in Florida and the #2 in the nation. Mother Daughter duo Alchabad and Maya Alzaiem run the vegan restaurant like their kitchen at home.

"Whenever we're at home, our main dishes are these kinds of foods, so the same things that we bring to the table we have here," shared Alzaiem. "We offer lot's of salads, lots of humus and dips."

READ: How a St. Petersburg museum is helping tell the city's story

Those dips and that humus is what made Alchabad's creations so sought after.

"Everyone knows my mom," said Alzaiem. "She has that like homey sense, she keeps putting food on their plate, you're not leaving hungry!"

The Middle Eastern cuisine is veggie-forward with lentils, baba ghanoush, fava bean salads and other offerings.

"She puts a lot of love into it," explained Alzaiem of her mother's work in the kitchen. "It's all recipes that she learned and came up with. It's all made fresh. It's always good fresh kind of food."

Their hope was to bring some healthy food options to South Tampa, yet the busy lifestyle of today means that food also needed to be something easy and convenient.

"We want people to feel good to have a good healthy meal that makes them feel light," said Alzaiem.

The Mediterranean Chickpea is located in South Tampa at 3215 S MacDill Avenue, Suite C.

For more information, click here.

STAY CONNECTED WITH FOX 13 TAMPA: