A relatively new shawarma spot, Erebuni, La Rioja 998, San Cristobal, just off the corner of Carlos…read moreCalvo. Erebuni is the name of a quite famous 8th century BCE fortress in Armenia, now a museum.
I chat with the young man running the place while he makes my "electric shawarma". Apparently he feels the need to make the point that it's an electric rotisserie, not gas, and that the meat won't have that lightly charred flavor from the flames. (He's right.) It's a slightly strange spit of steak - I'm used to seeing fairly thin sliced meat sort of all stacked together so that it can be shaved off into fairly fine bits as it rotates. This is a stack of maybe 3/4″ thick steaks on a spit. He doesn't carve off thin shavings, he cuts off large chunks of steak, then dices it up, and kind of moves it to the back in front of the coils, turning it over and over to cook it through, which it clearly hasn't. It takes a solid ten minutes to make a shawarma.
He asks me if I've ever had shawarma before, and I aver that I have. He asks me if I've found anywhere else in Buenos Aires that offers shawarma and I suggest that I've tried close to a hundred places. He seems stunned. He tells me that he thought that he was the first, or at least there were no more than a couple of places, hard to find. I consider pointing out that he was able to find a shawarma rotisserie in a restaurant supply shop, but decide against it.
He holds up the flatbread vaguely near to the electric coils to warm it, then jam packs it with the now cooked meat. He scatters some lettuce and a couple of pieces of onion. He squiggles a yogurt sauce and a hot sauce over it. The latter turns out to be some sort of tomato and bell pepper sauce. The shawarma is so packed that there's no real way to roll it up and eat it, it's more like lifting a U shaped sling and attempting to bite in. The meat is tough and gristly. The sauces are reasonably tasty. The scant vegetation offers nothing to the mix. It runs 100 pesos, just a shade over $5.
It looks nothing like the picture he has on display of what his shawarma look like. The real thing at Erebuni, of which I don't even eat half of it, not so much.
