Middle Eastern street food shawarma consists of vertical rotisserie grilled meat in a pita wrap with fresh vegetables.
According to Yellow Pages, there are more than 92 shawarma restaurants in Calgary. So why are they so prominent in the city?
Rise of shawarma in Calgary
Ramzal Salem owns Beirut Street Food, an authentic Lebanese restaurant in Calgary located at Fairmount Drive and Flint Road. Her parents, who are from Lebanon, raised her surrounded by fresh Lebanese food.
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Salem owned a donair restaurant for 15 years before opening Beirut Street Food, which serves shawarma. By cooking Lebanese food with charcoal, a technique not used in Calgary, she created a unique dining experience with a fresh concept.
Salem has seen the evolution of cultural cuisine in Calgary her entire life. She’s seen the city evolve from burgers and fries to increasingly multicultural cuisine.
“It’s nice when you can get and be exposed to different kinds of foods from all over the world right here in Calgary,” said Salem.
“Shawarmas are healthy and fresh and it’s just really nice to see that people are turning to different cultures and different foods. It’s wonderful that people are integrating with everyone else,” said Salem.
The evolution of cultural cuisine in Calgary
Julie Moreno–known online as “Calgary Foodie”–is a food blogger who visits and promotes restaurants in Calgary on her social media. Born in Bogota, Colombia, she moved to Canada when she was eight.
Moreno tries different cuisines from all over the world because she loves to cook and eat good food.
Moreno believes cultural food is popular in Calgary because it brings nostalgia to people born into that culture, reminding them of home.
“I think culturally significant food is very important because it represents a whole group of people and brings them together,” said Moreno.
“In a place like Calgary, somewhere it is very multicultural, it allows you to share nostalgia of where you are from with people who may not be familiar with it,” said Moreno.
However, the history of where shawarma originated from is quite complex.
Origin of shawarma
The scholarly book Making Levantine Cuisine, edited by Anny Gaul, Graham, Auman Pitts, and Vicki Valosik, concluded that shawarma originated in the Levant during the 19th century.
The countries currently reside where the Levant used to be are Syria, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestinian Territories, and the Northern Syrian Region. However, the Ottoman Empire ruled the region from the early 16th to the 20th century.
“The cuisine found in Levant underwent a major transformation as a result of the introduction of new world foods, industrialization, colonization, and global mobilization,” wrote Gaul. These factors resulted in different Middle Eastern cuisines, such as Lebanese and Palestinian.
Despite the Classical and medieval history of the Levant being well documented, the historical record is almost silent on the transformations of the cuisines. “This straddling of centuries-wide gap between textual sources and contemporary descriptions of the region’s food represents a creative, and arguably necessary, approach to an under-documented history,” wrote Gaul.
According to Gaul, the United States and Canada got inhabitants from the Ottoman Mount Lebanon, who migrated early in the last century.
“Lebanese restaurants were common in the U.S. and Canada by the 1970s. Recreating the experience of cooking and hospitality is one way the current wave of immigrants reconstruct a sense of normalcy,” wrote Gaul.