Yummy Shawarma: a wave of delicious warmth in Iqaluit

Khldoun El-Shamaa of Yummy Shawarma holds up a finished plate of Lebanese specialties. (PHOTO COURTESY OF YUMMY SHAWARMA)

Hassan Abdul Ghani, left and Khldoun El-Shamaa man the shawarma spits at Yummy Shawarma, the latest addition to Iqaluit’s culinary landscape. (PHOTO BY SARAH ROGERS)

Khldoun El-Shamaa, who owns and operates Iqaluit’s first Lebanese restaurant, gets ready to prepare a shawarma sandwich for a customer. (PHOTO COURTESY OF YUMMY SHAWARMA)

Yummy Shawarma overlooks Airport Road, Iqaluit’s busy connection to the airport. (PHOTO BY JIM BELL)

Walking out of the cold into Khldoun El-Shamaa’s Iqaluit restaurant is like hitting a wave of delicious warmth.

Yummy Shawarma, located on Iqaluit’s Airport Road, opened its doors this past April 1, adding Lebanese fare to the community’s culinary options.

And people in Iqaluit seem to like it, El-Shamaa says.

“People tell us it’s yummy a lot,” he said. “It’s funny, it’s nice. But we haven’t heard any complaints. They keep coming back.”

El-Shamaa left his native Lebanon for Canada six years ago and has called Iqaluit home for about four years.

He’s worked security and driven cabs, but when he heard that the former Fantasy Palace café was on the market, he saw an opportunity to grow his own business in Iqaluit.

Now El-Shamaa owns the restaurant, which he runs with his father-in-law Hassan Abdul Ghani and a handful of staff.

You can see their evident pride in Nunavut and Canada, their new home, in the display of the territorial and Canadian flags — along with the iconic flag of Lebanon that shows a green cedar against a white and red background.

Lebanon, bordered by Syria to the north and Israel to the south, has often been racked by war and civil unrest.

But you can appreciate Lebanon’s 7,000 years of history and its beauty by looking at the restaurant’s many photos of Lebanon’s cities and landscapes.

And you can taste the country’s multicultural roots in the cuisine, which reflects a mix of Arabic and French influences.

As the name suggests, Yummy Shawarma specializes in shawarma, a fast food staple across the Middle East and most major cities in the world.

Shawarma is a pita bread or flat bread sandwich filled with shaved beef, chicken or other meat, spiced with smokey cardamom, cumin, coriander, turmeric, allspice, garlic powder and cinnamon.

Your shawarma arrived with fixings like tomatoes, hot peppers, tahini (sesame sauce), hummus (chickpea purée) — even bright pink pickled turnips — which offer tangy tastes not found anywhere else in Iqaluit.

“The idea is that it’s different than any other food that’s available,” El-Shamaa said. “It’s very popular in Ottawa [where El-Shamaa lived for two years]. Most people know it from travelling.”

The restaurant also serves up falafel (deep-fried herbed chick pea balls), donair (a Canadian variation of the kebab sandwich of spicy meat) and meat or spinach pies.

Customers can fill their plates with side orders such as a salad like tabouli, perfumed with mint and parsley, fattush (crunchy bread salad made from toasted or fried pieces of pita bread), vine leaves stuffed with rice or baba ghanouj, a velvety purée of roasted eggplant blended with olive oil, lemon juice and spices like garlic.

The aromas rising from the plates offer diners a walk through warmer temperatures and bright sunshine of Lebanon.

And for dessert, Yummy Shawarma serves up a wide selection of baklava, a rich pastry made of layers of filo pastry sweetened with honey and nuts. It’s so well-liked,thieves who recently broke into the restaurant stole all the desserts they could find.

To wash it all down are a variety of tangy fruit juices and soft drinks, which come to Iqaluit directly from Lebanon.

But Yummy Shawarma’s most popular order in its six months of operation is by far is chicken shawarma, spiced and sliced off the spit. That feeds about 60 per cent of customers, El-Shamaa said.

While Iqaluit has quickly warmed to the food, some are still new to Lebanese cuisine.

El-Shamaa says he’s happy to oblige, by explaining the different offerings and giving customers a sample to taste.

The restaurant has also become the focal point of Iqaluit’s Lebanese community, which is about 40 strong today.

El-Shamaa thinks it’s important to offer ethnic food to Iqalummiut, to reflect the growing multicultural nature of the surrounding community.

Business has been “up and down,” starting off strong and slowing down some weeks, El-Shamaa said.

But Yummy Shawarma has a strong base of regular customers some of whom eat at the restaurant every day to support it, he said.

El-Shamaa, whose second child is on the way, hopes his business will stick around for years to come.

“Business just has to stay steady,” he said. “It’s very expensive to run a business here. But I want it to be long-term.”

To help promote business, El-Shamaa works long days — the restaurant is open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. most days — and Yummy Shawarma also offers home delivery and event catering.

And for those who don’t get around to cooking a turkey this year, El-Shamaa even plans to open the restaurant on Christmas Day.

Some of the fixings that go into a shawarma: tomatoes, hot peppers, tahini, hummus, falafel — even pickled turnips. (PHOTO COURTESY OF YUMMY SHAWARMA)