Young & Hungry dropped by the Northeast D.C. eatery for a bite of Sissi's exclusively super-starchy sandwich, priced at $6.50, last night. And it tastes, well, pretty much like you'd expect a pile of greasy fries, smothered in ketchup and creamy cole slaw, then wrapped into a griddled pita, to taste: full of fat and guilt. (The menu also mentions pickles in the mix, but mine had none.) Sissi's new eatery might trace its roots to the Middle East. But this thing seems entirely American to me. Vendors should hawk it at the Iowa State Fair, if they don't already.

After a few bites...

Subsequently dissected....

Photos by Chris Shott

The Cuisine: Sudanese, Middle-Eastern, Pizza

The Go-To Dish: Beef or chicken shawarma...after dark

The Scoop: As the clock slowly ticked on toward midnight on a recent cold weekday evening in Adams Morgan, my stomach began to alert me that it was time for a snack. I was with friends and we made our way out onto the corner of Florida Avenue and U Street NW, the remedy to my hunger became clear and a few steps away: late night shawarma at El Khartoum.

It had been a few years since I had been there and for a second I thought the unthinkable had happened—El Khartoum, the Sudanese-owned late-night greasy spoon, no longer existed. The restaurant's awning had been changed and instead donned the name "Pizzeria Trattoria." I walked inside to find the same decor and menu as I had remembered at El Khartoum and asked the guy behind the counter if I was in the right place. He informed me it was still called El Khartoum and the menu was the same. But he said it was also called Pizzeria Trattoria, because they now deliver pizza. Confused as all hell, but relieved, I ordered a chicken shawarma off the hot meat skewer behind the counter.

After my first bite, nostalgia from my previous visit came laced with tahini and added a comfortable warmth to the end of what was a terrific night. But the pita was too soft and crumbled while I ate it and the meat could have used additional spices. But for midnight snack on a weekday for only $6.50, it hit the spot.

The Verdict: It's ironic that I had Scott Reitz's recent Young & Hungry post on Budweiser still fresh in my head when I ventured out to El Khartoum. Just like Reitz's admission that while craft beers are great, sometimes a good 'ole fashioned Bud does just the trick. Well, that's how I feel about El Khartoum. As a late-night snack option, El Khartoum aka Pizzeria Trattoria aka whatever the hell they decide to call themselves next, is just right.

Photos by Andrew George

The Spot: Chez Manelle, 2313 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA, (703) 522-2140

The Cuisine: Tunisian, Middle Eastern

The Go-To Dishes: Hummus with beef shawarma, Couscous Manelle, Tunisian-style rice with chicken and vegetables

The Scoop: Members of the Arlington working class rejoice! Amid the sea of Five Guys and Subway outlets around the Courthouse Metro is Chez Manelle, which according to its website is the first Tunisian restaurant in the United States. That's a pretty bold statement, and I could find nothing to disprove it via the standard web searches. Whether unique or not in the U.S., though, this cozy spot on Wilson Boulevard serves up authentic Tunisian dishes as well as various Middle Eastern favorites, all at pretty reasonable prices.

I walked in to find a fairly empty restaurant with Arabic programming on the TV, a hookah setup by the windows, and oddly placed pink wraparound neon. The menu is exciting but also confusing, with just too many options, all of which sound remarkably good. My father always taught me to order a restaurant's specials, since there's a reason they're specials. On the day I visited, Chez Manelle's daily special was Tunisian-style rice with chicken and vegetables. I ordered the dish with an appetizer of hummus and beef shawarma.

The steaming shawarma on hummus arrived with dabs of olive oil on top. The meat lacked spice and was incredibly lean, but the hummus was distinctive — not necessarily lemony or garlicky or earthy, but almost sweet. The appetizer came with a side of steaming mlawi bread for dipping purposes. Showcasing the influence of French cuisine in Tunisia, this bread is a delicious hybrid of pita and croissant, made out of phyllo dough and cut into squares.

As with a lot of Tunisian dishes, the chicken with rice and vegetables was lightly flavored with harissa, a type of saucy seasoning made with red chili, garlic, salt, cumin, coriander, and olive oil. Despite its wealth of aromatics, the dish was neither too spicy nor salty, but perfectly balanced. Although filling, everything tasted fresh and light.

The Verdict: With just about every entree under $10, Chez Manelle is a fantastic alternative to the fast food chains near the Courthouse Metro station.

Taste Insight, "Tacos al Pastor" with Nicholas Gilman from Inside Mexico on Vimeo.

Forgive Y&H's obsession with tacos this week, but I've been fascinated by the wealth of history behind this simple Mexican street snack. Take tacos al pastor. Many taquerias don't prepare them the traditional way, which requires a vertical rotisserie like the ones you see in shawarma shops. 

In the video above, Nicholas Gilman explains the presence of these spits in Mexican taquerias. They're legacies, it seems, of the Lebanese natives who brought them to Mexico in a wave of immigration in the mid-20th century. Mexican taco makers merely adapted them to a meat more common in Latino cuisine.

Not that I don't trust Mr. Gilman, but I wanted to do some fact-checking on this page in culinary history, so I turned to Mark Miller's excellent cookbook, Tacos. Miller, if you'll recall, is trained both in anthropology and cooking. The father of Southwestern cuisine, Miller founded the Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe and the late Red Sage in D.C.

Here's what Miller says about tacos al pastor:

The meat for these "shepherd's" tacos is commonly seen roasting on vertical spits displayed with pride on street stands throughout Mexico. The spits are usually topped with a pineapple, which is thinly sliced and served in the tacos. This method of cooking meat is identical to that used for the spit-roasted lamb (shawarma) brought to Puebla, Mexico, by Lebanese immigrants in the 1930s. The technique was copied by the Mexican taqueros (taco masters), who substituted pork for lamb. The original stand for tacos al pastor still exists in Puebla, with vertical spits of pork still revolving in front of its huge wood-burning hearth.

So where in the D.C. metro here can you get tacos al pastor still prepared on spits? This place right here.

Disclaimer: Food critics eat anonymously because the average restaurateur, if given the chance, would make sure that a critic had the best experience possible at his restaurant; one that the average diner would not have. Seeing as I promised Qumseya to come by when the shawarma might be juicier, I do know, for a fact, that I was treated differently the second time around than when I wandered in off the street a few weeks back. I agreed to a second visit in part because I felt guilty for slamming his restaurant when it already had—among other things—location going against it. (Case in point: When I showed up Wednesday morning, someone had sloppily vandalized Shawarma King's storefront using acid, which left clearly visible grooves in the glass.) But more importantly, I wanted to see if Qumseya was blowing smoke about the shawarma being better right around lunchtime than during the late afternoon. Qumseya refused—not once, but twice—to accept my money. I paid nothing for my meal.

Qumseya and his wife are setting tiny silver bowls of spices on the tables in Shawarma King when I show up a few minutes before 11 a.m. Qumseya stops what he's doing and shakes my hand as if he is surprised to see me. He must have sensed at our earlier meeting that I'm the type to break a date.

I want to get down to the business of reviewing shawarma, but before I can say anything, Qumseya explains that the meats won't be ready until just after 11 a.m.

The tour starts at the vertical gas burners that are blazing away on their highest setting. Within seconds I'm trying to intercept my sweat before it drips onto the floor, as Qumseya explains that the chicken goes on the skewer at 9:30 a.m. and the beef at 9 a.m. Both are usually ready a few minutes after Shawarma King opens at 11 a.m., he says. The beef marinates overnight for 8 hours and the chicken for 3-4 hours (which explains why the beef shawarma is the more vinegary of the two). A minute into the tour and I am drenched in sweat. I ask Qumseya about the heat.

"We keep it on high all day," he says, breaking into a dignified sweat of his own. "Some people turn it down like this to keep from drying," he adds, "and then turn it up like this when a customer comes in."

Shortly after it opened in late December 2008, Shawarma King received two back-to-back visits from health inspectors, according to Qumseya. Both times the inspector went straight for his meat thermometer.

Qumseya knew that because he doesn't cook his meat to order, he has to keep it at serving temperature all day or else risk fines. After the inspections, he says he realized that "making it small and making it twice is better than making it big and turning down the heat."

Small, in this case, is relative. One batch of chicken shawarma makes approximately 30 sandwiches, and a batch of beef, which is slightly more popular and thus bigger, makes 40 sandwiches.

Qumseya has made only one large batch since opening. "On March 25," he says while looking wistfully out the acid-stained window, "a party of 60 people said they were coming to my restaurant for a celebration. I made a big shawarma then."

At our earlier meeting, Qumseya told me that he gets his meat shipped to the store. For some reason, I left that meeting under the impression that the meat came pre-seasoned. When I bring this up, Qumseya breaks his reverie and asks me to follow him to the kitchen, where he retrieves two bloody bags of vacuum-sealed meat from the fridge as evidence that no one spices Qumseya's beef and chicken but Qumseya.

I ask for his marinade recipe.

"Lemon and vinegar..." he says, his voice trailing off, "and some other things."

He looks at the bloody package in front of him, swears that it's the best meat his money can buy, and then sighs.

"In my country—in Bethlehem," he says, "we didn't buy meat from the wholesaler; we got it fresh every day from the butcher."

A smaller bag in the fridge contains lamb, the fat of which he places in between layers of beef to keep it moist. Oddly, most of his American customers request that he omit the lamb fat from their sandwiches.

"But it's tasty," I say.

"Tell them that," he says.

Next Qumseya shows me his bread. Like the meat, it comes in a package that has someone else's name on it. Qumseya points to the ingredients on the bag of lavash from the Middle East Bakery.

"No soy," he says.

I ask him why he doesn't make his own. Surely the recipe for soy-free lavash isn't a secret.

"This bag costs one dollar for four pieces," he says. "I could make ten pieces of lavash for one dollar, but it wouldn't taste as good. Makes more sense to buy."

This is no small admission for Qumseya, who solemnly counts among his restaurant credentials his bachelor's degree in food science, obtained from Iraq's Basra University in 1978.

I ask him what he does make in the store. He points at the menu and begins naming items: shawarma salad, hummus, falafel, tzatziki. His wife, who has been eyeing me suspiciously from behind the counter, says something to him in Arabic. Qumseya lights up and points to the row of large jars in the back of the kitchen.

"We make our turnips!"

His wife interjects. "We pickle them," she says.

Qumseya nods impatiently before resuming. "They take about—"

"—three days," she says.

"—a week," Qumseya fires back, shooting an ornery sideways glance at his wife and then smiling apologetically at me.

She says something to him in Arabic. He shrugs.

I pull out my cell phone to check the time. It's 11:10 a.m. I ask him when I can eat a sandwich.

"A few more minutes," Qumseya says. "Let's have coffee first."

Realizing that this isn't going to be an in-and-out affair, I settle down at a table at the back of the store near the storage room. Qumseya arrives from the kitchen carrying a tray on which there are two small, ornate espresso-sized cups with saucers, and a steal ladle attached to a small vat. Qumseya pours us each a cup of coffee and then settles into the seat opposite mine.

"It's good that Americans write about restaurants," he says. "The competition is better for the customers, and I like that."

He takes a long sip.

"But I didn't see it coming."

I consider apologizing as I raise my cup to my face. This is not the visit I had planned. The coffee is bitter, black, and muddy, with a hint of mint. Instead I ask him, "Does this Turkish coffee have mint in it?"

His mood changes immediately.

"I don't know why they call it Turkish coffee. It's Arabic coffee."

He hops out of his seat and disappears into the storeroom. He comes back holding a green bag of coffee covered in Arabic writing. He hands it to me and I see English writing on the front: "Cafe Najjar with Cardamom." Cardamom, not mint.

When I look up from the bag, I discover that Qumseya has disappeared again. This time he is behind the counter, poking at the chicken.

"You want a sandwich?" He calls over his shoulder.

He directs my attention to the shawarma, both of which are bubbling with fat and marinade.

"Falafel is old, but shawarma is new, only 50 or 60 years," he says as he slices fatty, seasoned pieces of chicken into the catch pan. "It started between Turkey and Greece and then spread to Europe and the Middle East."

He asks me what I want on my sandwich and I tell him to make it as if he were going to eat it. He grabs my lavash out of the toaster and smears it with hummus then walks to the grill and piles on the chicken shawarma. I notice that he's making my sandwich with much more meat than when I was here last time. He walks back to the topping bar and carefully spoons on some onions, pickles ("The best in D.C.," Qumseya claims. "From Bethlehem!"), shawarma salad, tehini, and garlic paste.

"Hot sauce?" He asks.

"Would you eat it with hot sauce?"

He drops on two spoonfuls of the red-pepper concoction.

I reach out my hand to intercept the sandwich. Qumseya ignores me as if I were a petulant child and instead wraps the sandwich in tinfoil and puts it on a panini press. When it's done, he tells me to sit down and then he brings me my sandwich in a basket. My worries that he'll hang around dissipate when his wife calls to him in Arabic. He spins on his heel, and they huddle 15 feet away on the other side of the counter.

As I munch in peace, enjoying a completely different and entirely superior sandwich than the one I ate two weeks prior, I wonder how in God's name I'll spin this experience into a legitimate review. Qumseya has been so sweet to me, and deep down I know that he really wants me to write something positive so that he can hang it on the wall of his shop. In that sense, he's angling for the better deal on this transaction. Dejected, I realize that I am no good at being objective. Either I write like my subjects are inhuman, which hurts their feelings, or I enjoy them so much that I'm incapable of saying anything that they might perceive as a slight.

Out of nowhere Qumseya appears at my elbow with a beef shawarma in pita bread. He demands that I cleanse my palate with coffee before he'll hand me the second sandwich.

"Eat this! I gave you extra lamb fat because you said you liked it!"

His wife is standing behind him, holding a piece of baklava on a napkin. They look delighted.

I am a terrible food critic.

(202) 462-8330

I ate my first shawarma-type sandwich in Baku, Azerbaijan, where street vendors call the shaved-lamb-and-pita combo a döner-kebab and top it with cilantro, tomato, cucumber, a ketchup-like red sauce, and fresh herbs. Baku doesn’t have much else in the way of fast food (the city’s three McDonald’s franchises charge more for a combo meal than its nicest restaurants charge for sturgeon steaks and caviar), so perhaps I found the döner-kebab tasty only because there was no place else to grab a quick bite between classes. For a similar quick bite in Adams Morgan, I turned to a chicken shawarma from the Shawarma King. A friendly cook topped it with pickles, cucumbers, tomatoes, and some Tzatziki per my request, but the sandwich failed to help me recall my earlier experience. While seasoned well, the chicken was a tad mealy—a side effect, perhaps, of chicken not being as fatty as beef and prone to drying out. Overall, it was a boring meal. Perhaps my choice of toppings was partially at fault, but, frankly, this trend of encouraging customers to load their sandwiches willy-nilly is a terrible idea. As I learned from watching the street vendors in Baku, there’s an optimal way to prepare most dishes—from hamburgers to pizza to Caesar salad to shawarma. The topping bar may have contained a chicken-redeeming trifecta of fresh veggies, sauces, and preserves, but that’s not what ended up on my sandwich. A list of go-to topping combinations or a knowledgeable line cook could have turned my sad sandwich around, but that’s not what happens at Shawarma King.

It's been a strange week for Young & Hungry. All you folks hiding behind computers seemed to prefer last week's postings over this week's. What's more, Mr. Y&H took one day off to follow the meandering ambitions of Joe Englert. So, with those disclaimers, here's the Top 5 of the week:

1. I've Eaten Enough Shawarma Now to Realize I Don't Understand Shawarma
2. More Details on Ray's the Steaks' Opening Night Smoke Out
3. Smoked Brisket, Pork, and Sausage Available at...Wait for It...Whole Foods!
4. 701: A Restaurant Week Experience That Didn't Feel Like One
5. Women Are Seduced by Men Who Cook, The Reverse Not So Much

My recent visit to Shawarma King, one of the new Middle Eastern sandwich joints in Adams Morgan, finally humbled me. As I sat there, chewing on yet another mediocre shawarma sandwich, its beef dry and its flavors as much sour as savory, I decided that I must be missing something. Or that my palate is too Americanized to appreciate this ubiquitous street food.

I mean, with the exception of the Lebanese Butcher and Restaurant in Falls Church, I don't think I've had a shawarma in this area that makes me want to stand atop the Washington Monument and shout its praises. Many of them, I find, are too dry (likely from spinning on the rotisserie for hours without enough fat to keep them moist) or too sour (from a marinade that can include yogurt, lemon and even pomegranates) or too underseasoned or served in stale pitas. Or all of the above.

With my visit to the Shawarma King, it finally dawned on me that I am the only constant in all my bleh experiences at shawarma joints. Maybe my expectations are all wrong. Maybe my palate is calibrated for the liberal amounts of seasonings that Western chefs use? Maybe sour should be the dominate flavor?

But here's one thing I know: The meat should never be dry. One manager of a shawarma shop in town told me that lamb in the Middle East is much fattier than the stuff available in the United States. (I suspect the same is true for beef, too, given how U.S. cattlemen are now producing leaner meat.) The two meats are (or should be) the starring ingredients in your shawarma sandwich, assuming you don't order a chicken shawarma.

Fat, of course, equals flavor, which might explain some of what's missing in my shawarma experience. But even if there were more fat, I'd still miss the seasonings. Sure, I could just pile more toppings onto the sandwich to add flavor, but then I'd just be drowning out the main ingredient, not complementing it.

Help me out here, you shawarma experts. Am I off base with my harsh assessments of our local offerings or do most of our shawarma shops just skate by on mediocrity?

1. D.C. Restaurant Week Pushed Back to February *
2. Timmy G's Ham Cruncher: The Sandwich That Glows
3. Want Some Shawarma? Head to Adams Morgan.
4. My Visit to Pat's In Five Easy Pictures
5. Blagojevich Burgers: Available to the Highest Bidder

* Thanks to Gothamist, the No. 1 post for the week was actually this video.

Adams Morgan has suddenly become Shawarma Central. Walid Abuelhawa's Old City Café & Bakery has been a reliable source for the Middle Eastern sandwich for more than two years, but now the former Amsterdam Falafelshop chef has some competition from two new shops: The Shawarma King at 1654 Columbia Rd. NW (202-463-8330) and the Shawarma Spot in the former M'Dawg Haute Dog spot at 2418 18th St. NW. (202-332-3797).

I haven't paid homage to the King yet, but I stopped by the Shawarma Spot for lunch today and was immediately impressed that the new owner had totally transformed the old M'Dawg space. You'd be hard-pressed to find any remnants of that short-lived dog shop. I was also impressed that just about everything is made in-house at the Spot: the carrot juice (I opted for the unsweetened version with its decidedly vegetal flavor, softened somewhat by the carrots' natural sweetness), the baklava (beautifully flaky, crunchy pastry with a dense, satisfyingly sweet filling), the kibbeh (didn't try it), and even the soft, white-flour pitas.

Bread, as we all know, can make or break a sandwich, and this warm, puffy pita is a magnificent partner to the rest of the ingredients in the Shawarma Spot's signature sammie. The bread's fresh-baked softness provides a nice contrast to the slightly chewy strips of marinated beef. Almost as important, the rounded, shell-like pitas are perfect containers for all the condiments that you can have added to your sandwich. I had the dude spoon a number of my favorite toppings into the pita, including caramelized onions, pickled beets, and hot pepper sauce. I couldn't seem to wolf down that sandwich fast enough. The chewy meat almost disappeared underneath that avalanche of flavors, and I mean that in a good way.

Now: Onto the Shawarma King!