You might look at this picture and think, "I thought she said chicken shwarma; what the hell is this?" And, for the most part, I would have to agree with you. When I think of shwarma, I see small eateries with meat roasting on an upright spit (similar to that used in gyro places), where the meat is sliced off in thin strips, then finely chopped with onion, tomato and lettuce before being wrapped up in flatbread to make a Middle Eastern snack that is part burrito, part salt lick. Yet, there is this one place nearby where Seth and I go to order "big platter" (the owners/cooks speak about 10 words of English and the 5 Arabic words in my lexicon don't help much*) and we are given a plate loaded with hummus, sliced vegetables, lettuce, flatbread and chicken that looks remarkably like this. Do they call it shwarma? I have no idea, but one of my Middle Eastern cookbooks does, so there it is.
