Vegan Shwarma Is Taking Tel Aviv By Storm
Image by iStock
What is the shwarma experience? It’s an indulgent pita sandwich dripping with fresh salads, tahini sauce dribbling down the sides, vegetables and amba. A couple of crispy fries topping the entire concoction never hurts. Oh, and it’s filled with shawarma. At new restaurant Sultana, that shawarma is completely vegan, harming zero animals in its making.
Usually shwarma is made by putting a chunk of raw meat on a large, rotating cone. As the meat rotates, it cooks, usually for hours. It’ll take a chef with some knife skills to cut off thin slices in exactly the right way, to adorn a crispy, warm pita just waiting to be eaten. Carnivores flock to this Middle Eastern street food, which is sort of like a cross between a gyro and a taco. It’s cheap, you can buy it anywhere in the Middle East, and it’s filling.
But Israel’s growing vegetarian demographic beg to differ. Israel is the country with the most vegans per capita, and the trend is only growing — so shwarma was ripe for a reboot.
Chef Harel Zakaim told Haaretz that “As far as I know this is going to be the first vegan shwarma made out of seitan [a meat substitute made of gluten].” But the forest mushrooms he will be using as a meat substitute are anything but fast food, requiring at least two hours to cook and a gentle touch when placing on the pita. Zakaim will also be offering vegan kebabs, alongside vegan tzatziki and labneh cheese.
Shira Feder is a writer. She’s at [email protected] and @shirafeder
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
