Review: Shawerma Shuwaikh

Picture taken from Froyo Nation

This is not really a very long waited review, its something I heard of and somehow ended up trying, and I basically I had to write this post just to see how many people out there agree with me.

Am guessing a lot of us LOVE shawerma despite the fact that we know its greasy, full of fat and calories, but we still eat it, cuz simply it taste really good! Kuwait was never the place to find a really good shawerma cuz non of those places tries to be specialized in it. However, if you travel to one of the middle eastern countries, you will definitely bump into at least a couple of those places with good shawermas. What am trying to say is that, we know what a good shawerma taste like, and sadly, Shawerma Shuwaikh wasnt one of them.

So am just gonna try to summarize what was good and what was bad about my experience in quick points, lets start with the good ones:

1. The menu: its true they had only 8 kinds of sandwiches, but to me this is a good variety. I also liked the fact that some were in Saj, sammoun or Lebanese bread.

2. The Place: I liked how small the place was yet it was well decorated. using those tiny screens and frames on the wall made it look nice. The location wasnt bad at all, located behind Shuwaikh’s Co-op, with enough parking spots.

3. Treatment: despite the fact how packed it was at 8:00pm, but the guys behind the counter tried their best to keep a smile on and try to get the job done. I just would hate to see someone panicing.

Now lets head to the bad side:

1. The shawerma wasnt really good! we have tried 4 kinds: Al Salhiya, Gass, Dickson House and Shawerma 1961. Salhiya and Gass were OKAY, however they were missing salt and a bit of lemon probably. I liked the size of Dickson and 1961 and the fact that the bread wasnt too thick, but too bad the spices were taking over and I didn’t end up tasting the shawerma well. In both sandwiches the parsley was stacked in one area and it felt like they used all these sauces to hide the shawerma flavour.

2. The service: we basically had to wait for over 40 minutes to get 4 sandwiches!! I don’t care how many orders they had, everyone seemed to be waiting, and if we weren’t starving we would have definitely canceled the order. It’s either their staff is working slow, or they just cant handle that much of orders at one time. And probably because they had to rush orders, the meat was a bit chewy! same goes for the fries, it was fried probably so many times that it got too crunchy and too oily, it was like eating chips not fries.

3. The Place: I did mention how nice it was, but I wasnt very comfortable with the fact that you can’t really see the meat stand or how they are preparing it. I know that we always go to restaurants and we don’t see how they prepare the food, but you can always see how they prepare shawerma, and to me it’s very important, that’s why I tried to have a sneak peek behind the counter,  and yeah the guy whose preparing the sandwiches was slow.

So I really don’t know about you guys, but I have had better shawerma’s !! its nice to see new restaurants with new concepts opening in Kuwait (I highly encourage that) but I wouldn’t lie about it and say that’s good when it’s not. However, we wish the owners the best, and we hope they take our comments into consideration.