We meet the former Bristol taxi driver serving the best street food in the city

With room for just two stools at the window counter and a kitchen, it’s so small that you can easily walk past and not even notice it.

Number 1a Nelson Parade has been various takeaway outlets over the years, including Indian and Hungarian but it’s now SunRa Kitchen serving authentic Middle Eastern street food.

This is the first food business from Dominic Eastland, a Bristol taxi driver for 17 years who, as a young man, also travelled the world working in casinos.

With his Superman bandana and easygoing manner, he has a Bohemian air that’s infectious. When he casually told me he bought a boat, but it’s stuck in Marseille, it came as no real surprise.

Prior to opening SunRa Kitchen, Dominic also spent a short spell working at Edna’s Kitchen on Castle Park in Bristol, which is where he obviously realised just how popular falafels are in the city. But then Dominic got his passion for Middle Eastern food from his Israeli dad and the food of his childhood has inspired SunRa Kitchen.

It opened at the start of 2023 and Dominic is running it singlehandedly, preparing and cooking the food in an open-view kitchen the size of a broom cupboard.

There’s a table with two chairs on the pavement, from where you can spot the towering cranes around East Street as the area is transformed with the building of high-rise student flats. And in some ways, this imminent influx of new residents is what tempted Dominic to open his modest little takeaway as the footfall in East Street is soon to increase.

Business so far has been unpredictable. Some days are a lot busier than others, which makes forward planning tricky when you’re making fresh salads that don’t take kindly to warm weather and can’t be kept for the next day.

But as he prepares my lunch, Dominic seems positive and cheery about the fact he’s finally running his own business. Many of the customers are walking the short distance from offices around Redcliffe, over Bedminster Bridge. The chap waiting for his food in front of me popped in as his mate was getting a passport photo taken in nearby Asda.

The blackboard menu is concise, with falafels in pitta bread (£6.95) or in a wrap for 55p more. And then there’s chicken schnitzel, a range of salad boxes and chips. And that’s pretty much it apart from sweet and sticky baklava.

The savoury dishes are all served with hummus, tahini, sauces, salad and pickles, and Dominic asks each customer how much spice or heat they can cope with.

I went for the falafel pitta and it was a revelation. It was also made with real care - I could see Dominic making the falafels from scratch, scooping balls of mixture with an ice cream scoop and dropping them into the hot oil.

The crisp, golden orbs had a green hue inside from all the herbs and placed in the soft pitta breads once the salads and pickles had been layered at the bottom of the bready cone. There were chopped fresh tomatoes and radishes, shredded cabbage, pickles, chillies, hummus and heaps of fresh coriander leaves and stalks.

Eaten together, the fragrant combination of hot and herby falafels with the crunch of the radish, coriander stalks and cabbage plus the creaminess of the garlicky hummus was a winner.

It was quite simply the best falafel pitta I’ve eaten anywhere in the city and precisely why SunRa Kitchen deserves to be enjoyed by more people. It’s a genuine ray of Middle Eastern sunshine on a dusty corner in downtown Bemmy.

SunRa Kitchen, 1a Nelson Parade, Bedminster, Bristol, BS3 4JA.