Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
There is nothing as ubiquitous to Bahraini feasts as shawarma. Originally from Turkey, the shawarma is an Arabic rendering of Turkish çevirme which means ‘turning,’ a reference to the slowly-turning vertical rotisserie or spit on which it is cooked.
Almost every neighbourhood in Bahrain has at least one shawarma joint, and as the sun sets, the aroma of spiced chicken or mutton cut into thin slices, stacked and roasting in a cone-like shape on a spit, floats through the air.
However, my daily commute to and from our Hoora office, no matter what time of day, is always slowed down and made more interesting as I drive through the Shawarma Alley of Bahrain, a side street near Block 338 in Adliya, where shawarma is always available, fresh and served to you right in your car, if you desire.
This week, to kick off the new year, we decided to do a different kind of Eating Out, a ‘Streeting out’ if you will and stopped by the shawarma alley and checked out four of their most popular shops, trying out a different kind of shawarma at each one.
The idea of the shawarma wrap, often just called the shawarma, is simple: bread, fries, vegetables, sauce and of course, the spit-roasted meat. At most shops in Bahrain, you may get one or two choices when it comes to bread but everything else is binary – you either get the vegetables or you don’t, for example.
But in the shawarma alley, with at least four different kinds of breads, a variety of fillings and each shop trying to stand out in comparison to competition, we had a delightful evening trying the different combinations.
At the first shop, we tried the chicken and mutton malgoom. The malgoom is your regular shawarma meat with fries and lettuce, but topped with cheese and wrapped in a Kerala-style parantha. It is a much softer and richer texture, but the cheese can push it into the too-rich spectrum.
At the second location, we ordered the sarook, which means rocket in Arabic. The sarook is generally made on a bigger parantha or saj ‘thin’ bread, and is basically a larger shawarma, which really does look like a rocket; a delicious rocket with flavour exploding in your mouth with every bite. The flavour was very unique, with a citrusy finish, and it was my personal favourite of the evening.
At the third joint, we ordered the saj bread chicken shawarma as we hung out in the cool evening street watching each shop’s waiters, conductors of the traffic on the street, dart between cars delivering and taking orders. The grill master here told us about the special garlic paste they use, and atop the paper thin saj bread, the herbaceous flavour profile really flows through.
And for the final taste, we crossed the street to try the mutton shawarma served on warm Lebanese bread. Commonly called the donair in Canada, this is what I had gotten used to in my years away from Bahrain. While absolutely delicious on its own, the bread didn’t quite match up to its predecessors.
While I thought of myself as Captain Shawarma until this review, I ended up learning how to properly order a shawarma wrap and its many cousins from Jalal, our sales and marketing manager and bona fide Bahraini. Our photographer, Honey Sharma, ended up with the title of Mr Shawarma, which is how many in Bahrain already know him, not just because of his surname but also because he taught us a life hack for shawarma alley: if you have that one vegetarian friend with you, every shop there can do a shawarma wrap, without the meat. But really, that’s not shawarma. That’s a wrap!
