Borjstar Shawarma Shop

🇸🇾 SYRIA / QUICK FIX: In an unlikely northeast Gardena shopping center, a shawarma purveyor to rival Los Angeles's best offers the styles popular with the Syrian diaspora.

🇸🇾 SYRIA via 🇳🇱 NETHERLANDS
📍 1330 Rosecrans Avenue,
Gardena, South Bay.
🅿️ Ample parking in plaza
🥤 No Alcohol

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“How are you? I missed you, did you miss me? I will make this my style, the best just for you!” A barrage of questions and statements comes from the counter when ordering a simple shawarma wrap at Southern California’s newest purveyor. A look around at the customers shows a cross-section much different than the typical Valley or Little Arabia shawarma shop, so clearly a more hands-on introduction is necessary to introduce a new clientele to the wonders of rotating meats.

No matter what your level of acquaintance is with these foods, a good way to dive into the shop’s specialty is with a wrap of chicken or beef shawarma. Both meats are on prominent display behind the counter and equally enticing. The spits are constantly being knifed and trimmed for orders of plates, wraps, and meat-covered fries.

A chicken wrap ($10.99, below) has a good amount of meat from the spit bundled with pickles and garlic sauce. More of this and a very mild “spicy” sauce are given on the side, both to be used liberally if you are the type. The meat itself is juicy on its own, but the array of flavors made from the sauces and pickles are just about perfect and will make you feel like you are ordering from a street window in Damascus, Beirut, or Amman.

The thin wrap these are put in will not wow you, but they crisp it up nicely on a flattop and it is very structurally sound all the way until the last bite. When ordering you can ask them to add the extra toum and spicy sauce before wrapping, so you do not have to constantly spread more.

To get into their meats unwrapped, plenty of options are available including one that continues to be more and more visible in Greater Los Angeles. What usually translates to “Arabic-style shawarma” in English is the most common way of eating the food on the streets of countries like Syria and Jordan. This consists of a wrap like the one above cut into sections and served with a big portion of fries.

Both meats are available in this style at Borjstar, the plate below is the Arabic beef shawarma ($16.99), further dusted with parsley and served with a side of pickles and salad. The beef is just as juicy as the chicken, but it is too much to resist lathering each bite with more of their delicious garlic and spicy sauces.

If you eat your meal at the shop or are waiting for an order, you may notice the recent addition of an ice cream machine. Underneath the TV that is on a constant loop of Arabic-language (and some various West African) music videos, a soft serve machine with cones is set up for customers to help themselves, with a neon sign proclaiming “free ice cream.” Now that is something you do not see everyday.

As Matthew Kang in Eater reports, Borjstar’s owner previously operated shawarma shops in the Netherlands, a fact that has one interesting hangover. A bit of an oddball on the menu, and definitely a cousin of this region’s carne asada fries, is the beautiful kapsalon bowl ($12.99, below), direct from Rotterdam.

While it might appear like a salad before digging in, the lettuce, cucumber, and tomato hides layers of the shawarma of your choice, cheese, and more fries. Unfortunately they have swapped out the typical Dutch gouda used in the Netherlands with mozzarella and omitted Indonesian sambal altogether, making the flavor profile a bit less full. To remedy this, dump a carton of their spicy sauce over the dish and you will be very happy.

Kapsalon has a fun origin story in Rotterdam, apparently a hair dresser of Cape Verde descent constantly walked next door to his favorite shop to grab a shawarma and asked for it this way. Eventually they named the dish after him (kapsalon is the Dutch for hair salon) and the preparation caught on with other customers and eventually throughout the country and now beyond. This may be the first instance of this particular world mashup dish in the country.

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