Abo Bashar's Shawarma, Dar es Salaam
First, the Toum garlic sauce punches you in the face, leaving no time for any concern for your impending sulphurous halitosis. Then, luxuriant layers of paper thin, glutinous Markook bread containing the world-spanning primaeval pleasure of rendered chicken fat, wrapped around crisp pickled white turnip and the most tender of meat shavings. But that Toum, always the garlic, never recedes from each fleeting bite of Abo Bashar’s shawarma.
Ilias, skin-tight green Polo, acid-washed jeans, long, thinly-greying, ponytail falling from his receding hairline, cuts an unlikely profile here in Dar es Salaam. I prod him with questions while attempting to quell the same embarrassed, doubting internal dialogue of a middle-schooler asking a girl out for the first time that, now, only discovers me when I’ve found a taste whose essence makes me want to weep. While the ash on the end of his slim cigarette lengthens improbably, he explains that his stall travels with the Syria Exhibit that crosses the country every six months or so.
Yes, the Syrian government officially sponsors the trade show. No, he doesn’t have a restaurant here, yet. Yes, he likes travelling around Tanzania. No, he doesn’t know when he’ll be back after the show leaves town next week. Yes, he runs a shawarma joint back home in Latakia, can’t I tell?
Of course I can. Everything about the place sings of a deeper ability than that of left-brained skill and instruction. On display here is insouciant perfection; a mastery of the five senses that can only be the product of a culinary Nature formed by centuries, millennia, of history, blood, and experience.
Rifat, matching baby blue thin cotton sweat suit, white tube socks, black Adidas flip flops, sweatband, identical dangling slim cigarette, wields the long knife as a painter does his brush. Rotating the meat with a judgmental stare, he selects a suitably browned layer for dissection. Plop, down it falls into a bath of fat. Scooping it into the readied layers of markook already covered with a ladleful of Toum and the acidic turnip julienne, the shawarma is assembled with two twists. Then, holding the package at its top, and with a single arcing movement, he dips the base back into the fat before briefly lighting it on fire using the red-hot grates of the machine. Finally, the completed, lightly toasted little wrap is left to sizzle on a griddle for a few seconds to crisp the outer layer’s fat. “Shukran”, I say, reaching out for my $3 bundle of perfection. A quick smile, all he can manage without losing the cigarette, is his response.
A few feet to the right, Hayyan, black athletic pants, red football T-shirt, close-fitted Nike baseball cap, thick black beard, begins to methodically roll out and cook sheet after sheet of markook bread. Dowel-sized rolling pin in hand, he lightly stretches each dough ball into a phyllo-thick single translucent layer, made stretchy and resilient from its long, slow-forming proteins. These are then casually tossed, Frisbee style, onto a 4-foot wide convex cast iron pan, the Saj. Cooking and puffing up in ten seconds in the extreme dry heat, he deftly pulls each off by hand, covering them in a dishtowel. Roll roll roll, stretch, toss, pick up, cover. Hayyan makes hundreds, each identical in thickness, unique in the pattern of its bubbles.
I see all this as I sit at my Pepsi-branded plastic table on my Coke-branded chair in the searing heat of the metal hangar, but my mind is elsewhere, racing with questions and buckling under emotions that, in me, only food can stir. How are these three improbables here? Why and how is the Syrian government doing this now? What do they think about being away, at this moment, from their country? Is it a relief or a burden? How is one selected to be the Designated Syrian Culinary Representative To Tanzania?
I don’t have answers to these, of course, and asking would risk my 5-minute old relationship with Ilias. Instead, while desperately attempting to fix each flavour and texture permanently in my brain, something my grandfather used to say about people, but whose truth I’ve fully understood in food, springs to mind. “Young people”, he said, “cannot be truly beautiful. True beauty requires age, the physical manifestation of sorrow in the form of a wrinkle or spot, an awareness of our decay and eventual death.” The fleeting nature of life – the realisation that the conversations, kisses, tastes, and … of any given day are, if not your last, then another step in that direction – gives a frenetic power to the mundane. More than anything else, food makes this clear to me daily, albeit evidently not on a moral level. As rubbery eggs, a lukewarm cup of coffee, or the split emulsion of a sauce can attest, nothing decays faster than the glorious, transient perfection of a good meal. What nourishes mind, body, and soul one minute will soon be fetid detritus, picked over by rats and maggots. Even Abo Bashar’s shawarma will face this fate.
No, I won’t ask Ilias the questions that burn in my mind. Nor will I order a second shawarma today in an attempt to atone for my melancholy with the facile balm of excess.
As I head to the counter to pay, a large family stands placing their orders. I hang around awkwardly, pretending to wait politely but actually trying, once again just like 13-year-old me, to think of something good enough to say to mark this occasion, to make him remember what this meant to me when he’s back in Latakia. Do I say something about hoping to visit? Too coy and, anyway, who is going to believe that these days? What about a reference to the millennia of history, both culinary and non-, that Syria is built upon: Phoenician, Roman, Crusader, Ottoman, etc.? What is this, a lecture at The Met?
Defeated, and spotting a gap in the customers, I reach out my hand.
“Did you like it?” he asks.
“Yes, it was wonderful. Nothing tastes as good as that. Absolutely perfect.”
“Thank you.”
“No, thank you”, I say with a nod, while looking him in the eyes.
Can eye contact, a nod, and a thank you convey it all? The gratitude, the sorrow, and the weight that today I was made to live, to think, to fully exist because of this sensory amalgamation, brought to bear with your skill?
I don’t know, but until next time, Ilias, it’ll have to do.
Isaac Middelmann-Orlov lives in Dar es Salaam, but can be found, whenever time and money allow him, trying not to cry into good food of all sorts around the world.