My brother-in-law is pretty fussy, particularly about food. In the 1980s, he and my sister made frequent visits to the city. Although our budgets were much more limited at the time, there was no way that he was going to eat anything that was called Shawarma or looked like the hunk of meat on a spit in the photo. No “mystery meat” for him. On a hot summer’s eve, strolling down trash-littered MacDougal Street, eating a food like this being sold streetside was a line he would not cross. In his defense, I must agree that that spit of meat on MacDougal Street has never been very appealing.
To this day, shawarma is a great little source of humor between us, and the mere use of the word will elicit chuckles, if not guffaws. But shawarma is a serious food served in countries around the world.
Shawarma is a middle Eastern Arabic sandwich. The meat may be lamb, mutton, beef, goat, or chicken (and occasionally mixtures). It is skewered and roasted on a long spit and served in a pita, typically with tomatoes, onions, and yogurt sauce. There are a myriad of spellings* and the sandwich is similar to others in the region, such as the Gyros of Greece or döner from Turkey. Yatagan, at 104 MacDougal Street, serves the Turkish variant known as döner kebab.
I keep an open mind and in reading various food reviews from many different sources, I find that numerous diners love a good shawarma or döner, and Yatagan appears to please. Comparison reviews of their döner kebab with others in the immediate area appear favorable. The falafels here are also touted by many to be superior to that of Mamoun’s, a village standby.
However, there is more mystery here than in the meat. According to the New York Times, on October 22, 1987, the owner of the Yatagan Kebob House, Gultekin Ismihanli, went beserk:
“A 42-year-old restaurant owner barricaded himself inside his Greenwich Village apartment last night, fired six shots from a .45 pistol into the air and held the police at bay for eight hours before surrendering early today, officials said. No one was wounded in the incident, which began around 4:25 P.M. when the man, Gultekin Ismihanli, fired the shots out of the second-floor window of his apartment at 106 Macdougal Street at Bleecker Street, the police said.”
No reason was given for the incident. Perhaps my brother-in-law was right and there is something to fear in that amalgam of twirling mystery meat 🙂
*Note about Shawarma: The word, which means turning in Turkish, is an Arabic transliteration, and like most middle eastern foods, the spellings are many: Shawerma, Shwarma, Shoarma, Shaorma, etc.
