The chicken shawarma stall in Souk el Tayeb in Beirut was not on the printed map our guide handed out. She walked us past the za’atar vendor, the labneh man, the woman selling pickled turnips in jars the color of a bruise, and then she stopped at a doorway most tourists would miss.
The Stall in Souk el Tayeb
Our guide was named Rana. She had been leading market walks on Saturday mornings for nine years and she knew which vendor had the better tomatoes that week without asking. The stall she stopped at was run by a woman called Teta Mariam, who lived in the apartment directly above it.
Mariam was in her seventies. Her grandson Karim ran the dinner spit downstairs, but the lunch shift, the marinade, the spice ratio, those were hers. She had been mixing them since the late sixties, she told me, in the same blue ceramic bowl her mother had used.
Rana translated. Mariam pulled a strip of chicken off the spit with a long knife, dropped it onto torn markook, swiped toum across it with the back of a spoon, and handed it to me. The bread was warm. The garlic was loud. The meat tasted of cinnamon and char and something I could not name then but recognised later as cardamom.
What She Told Me About Shawarma Djaj
Mariam corrected me twice while we ate. First, she said shawarma is not a recipe. It is a method. The word comes from the Turkish çevirme, meaning turning, and the whole technique came down to the Levant from Ottoman Bursa in the nineteenth century, originally with lamb. Chicken came later, through the twentieth century, as cities grew and people wanted something lighter and cheaper.
Second, she was firm that the warmth in a proper Lebanese marinade comes from allspice, cinnamon, cardamom and cumin. Not curry powder. Not garam masala. Not the jars labelled “shawarma spice” sold in airport gift shops, which she said with a small dismissive wave.
I wrote it down on the back of the market map. I still have that map.
Bringing It Back to a Los Angeles Kitchen
I cannot replicate a vertical spit in my apartment. Nobody can. What I can do is roast strips of marinated thigh hot and tight on a wire rack so they baste each other the way the meat does on a spinning stack, then finish under the broiler to get the char on the high points.
The allspice I order online from a Lebanese importer in Dearborn. The cardamom I get from the Persian market on Westwood. Everything else, including the yogurt, comes from the Sunday farmers’ market I walk to with a tote bag and no shopping list. I tried the supermarket allspice once. Flat. Lifeless. Do not.
What I Used
- Two and a half pounds of boneless skin on chicken thighs, the skin matters here
- Three quarters cup plain whole milk yogurt, not Greek, the thinner Levantine kind
- A quarter cup of fresh lemon juice, about two large lemons
- Three tablespoons of good olive oil
- Eight cloves of garlic crushed to a paste with salt
- Two teaspoons each of cumin and coriander
- Two teaspoons of sweet paprika, Aleppo if you can find it
- One and a half teaspoons of ground allspice
- One teaspoon of ground cinnamon
- Three quarters teaspoon of ground cardamom
- Half a teaspoon of turmeric for color
- One teaspoon of black pepper, ground that morning
- One and a half teaspoons of fine sea salt
Inside the Marinade and Inside the Oven
The yogurt does two jobs at once. Its lactic acid loosens the muscle fibers in the thigh, and its fat carries the fat soluble flavor compounds in the cardamom and cinnamon deep into the meat. Twenty four hours in, the strips will look almost orange and feel slack between your fingers.
When the chicken hits the four hundred and fifty degree oven, the surface yogurt dries first. It forms a thin lacquer that holds the spices in place instead of letting them scorch and turn bitter. Underneath that shell the muscle proteins are still slowly tightening, squeezing juice out, and that juice pools on the sheet pan and reduces into something I scrape up with a spatula and pour back over everything at the end.
Then the broiler. Six inches below the element, four to six minutes, no walking away. The high points blacken first, the edges curl, the kitchen smells like a Beirut sidewalk at midnight and not like Highland Park on a Tuesday.
What I Adapted, What I Refused To
I serve mine with toum, pickled pink turnips, sliced tomato, sumac onions and a small pile of fries tucked inside the wrap, because that is how Mariam served hers. Many people in the US reach for tzatziki here. Tzatziki is for gyros. Gyros are Greek. Shawarma is not gyros, and the herbs are different, and the sauce is different, and Mariam would have raised an eyebrow.
I almost added a chili oil drizzle the first time I made this at home. Actually no. The cardamom and allspice are already doing the heavy lifting and chili would muddy them.
One honest admission. The first batch I made in my kitchen I marinated for only three hours because I was impatient. The flavor was on the surface and nowhere else. The full twenty four hour soak is not optional if you want the spices in the meat instead of on it.
The Wistful Part
I am writing this on a Sunday afternoon with the sheet pan cooling on the stove and the apartment smelling the way Mariam’s stall smelled. Not exactly. Close. Close enough that for a minute I was back at the market with Rana translating and Karim shouting something at his cousin across the alley.
Mariam passed away in the spring of 2024. Karim still runs the stall. I have not been back since.
I will go. I owe her at least that. In the meantime I roast the chicken the way she described it, twenty four hours of patience and six minutes of nerve under the broiler, and I eat it standing at the counter with the markook in one hand and the toum on the other. It is not the same. It is the closest I can get.
Chicken Shawarma
Ingredients
Equipment
Method
- Pat the chicken thighs dry with paper towels and lay them flat on a cutting board. Slice each thigh into thin strips about a quarter inch thick, working with the grain. Transfer the strips to a large mixing bowl.
- In a small bowl, combine the cumin, coriander, paprika, allspice, cinnamon, cardamom, turmeric, black pepper and salt. Stir with a fork until evenly blended into a fragrant rust-colored powder.
- Crush the garlic cloves with a pinch of salt into a smooth paste using a microplane or the flat of a knife. Scrape the garlic into the bowl with the chicken.
- Add the yogurt, lemon juice, olive oil and the spice blend to the chicken. Use your hands to massage everything together for a full minute, working the marinade into every strip so the meat takes on a uniform deep-orange color.
- Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 8 hours, preferably 24. The yogurt will tenderize the meat and the warm spices will perfume it all the way through.
- When ready to cook, position an oven rack 6 inches below the broiler element and preheat the oven to 450 F. Set a wire rack inside a rimmed sheet pan and brush the rack lightly with olive oil.
- Remove the chicken from the refrigerator and let it sit at room temperature for 20 minutes. Lay the strips out on the wire rack in a single tightly packed layer, allowing some pieces to overlap slightly so they steam-baste each other the way a vertical spit stack does.
- Roast in the 450 F oven for 22 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through and the edges are darkening and crisping.
- Switch the oven to broil on high. Broil the chicken for 4 to 6 minutes, watching closely, until the high points blacken and char in spots and the kitchen smells of toasted cinnamon and garlic.
- Transfer the chicken to a cutting board and let it rest for 5 minutes. Using a sharp chef's knife, slice the strips crosswise into thin ribbons, the way a shawarma cook shaves them off the spit.
- Pour any juices and rendered fat from the sheet pan over the sliced meat and toss to coat. Taste and adjust salt and lemon. Serve immediately, piled into warm pita or markook with toum, pickled turnips, tomato and sumac onions on the side.