‘Better than Sydney’: The Underwood shawarma that needs to be on your radar

In Brisbane Times’ Heartlands series, Food and Culture Editor Matt Shea seeks out the migrant restaurants, cafes and stores that give the city’s food scene its rich texture. This month, an unassuming Underwood restaurant that’s turning heads with its shawarma.

Usually it takes two recommendations for this column to take note of a suburban restaurant.

Is the place actually good? Or just local good? Or, even worse, does someone know the owner and is just pissing in your pocket?

I’m not sure I’d heard about Zooroona until a charcoal chicken shop owner told me about it.

“I’m from Sydney and grew up around shawarma,” he said. “This is better than anything I had in Sydney.”

But when Johnny Moubarak – owner of Gerard’s, perhaps Brisbane’s most celebrated Middle Eastern restaurant, and an obsessive when it comes to Levantine food – gives Zooroona a co-sign, you set your GPS for Underwood.

And we’re here to report that the intel checks out. Zooroona’s shawarma is good. Very, very good.

The restaurant itself is in a fairly obscure spot, even by Underwood standards: part of a twin set of shops gathered around the intersection with Fermont Road. There’s a vegetarian restaurant, an NDIS provider, a subcontinental supermarket and a satellite and antenna store.

Zooroona stands out among the neighbours with its signage, produced in the bright green and red of the Lebanese flag.

“Do you know what zooroona means in Arabic?” owner Mohammed Ghadban asks. “It means, ‘visit us’. We want people to come and see what we’re doing here.”

“Twenty years of shawarma mastery” a post reads on Zooroona’s Instagram. But Ghadban actually opened the shop two years ago in the premises previously occupied by Limon, a Turkish and Mediterranean restaurant.

“It was something for the community,” Ghadban says. “It’s very multicultural here; people know what shawarma is.

“I felt we didn’t have enough food in Brisbane – authentic Middle Eastern food. I was in construction, and I sold up and said, ‘I’m going to do this, try something different.’”

“I knew nothing about hospitality. Nothing. But I had a passion for it, so I just started building the shop, getting it ready. I had three chefs before I met Diab.”

That’s the 20-year part. Half Syrian, half Lebanese, Diab Kubahji had just arrived in Australia as a refugee when he met Ghadban, and had an extensive background working as a shawarma chef.

“When Diab came, that was it. Game over,” Ghadban says.

So what makes Zooroona’s shawarma so good? It’s all in the fat, Ghadban reckons.

“We import our fat from Lebanon,” he says.

Specifically, lamb tail fat, known as leyya in Arabic. Lebanese sheep breeds such as Awassi are characterised by a large, broad tail. In Levantine cuisine, the fat from the tail is traditionally used to preserve meat for harsh winters and then eaten raw, but can also be rendered down and used to add flavour to dishes such as fried eggs or shakshuka.

At Zooroona, it’s placed on the vertical spit atop the stacks of marinated beef and chicken, and then in between the layers of meat. As the meat slow-cooks on the spit, the fat drips down through the beef and chicken, lending it an extra element of savoury richness.

For service, the meat is sliced away, tightly wrapped in house-made saj bread with pickled cucumber and toum (for the chicken), or pickled turnip, onion salad, tahini and pomegranate sauce (for the beef), and given a quick toast on the griddle under a weighted press – and that’s all there is to it.

The simplicity of the chicken shawarma makes it particularly good. The lamb fat adds a gamey note to the protein, but also, along with the silken toum, a lovely, luscious mouthfeel. The pickle provides welcome crunch, as does some of the best saj we’ve encountered, kept relatively thin for a super-tight wrap.

“I’ll tell you what makes our sandwiches so nice – we keep it simple,”

“I’ll tell you what makes our sandwiches so nice – we keep it simple,” Ghadban says about the chicken shawarma. “It’s the typical Lebanese way. In some places in Lebanon, they’ll put chips in it, and in some places in Syria they put chips in it. Syrians love it with pomegranate molasses, Lebanese without.”

Word is spreading about Zooroona. When he opened the shop, Ghadban was serving between 300 and 400 shawarma wraps a week. Now, it’s closer to 2000. He’s in the process of converting an attached supermarket into extra seating, his nephew Hassan Ghadban has come onboard working under Kubahji (his son Moses also works in the shop) and he’s set to open a Gold Coast outlet later this month.

“And we have a site on the north side locked in,” he says.

Ghadban describes himself as “Australian made, Lebanese parts”. So, does Zooroona’s food remind him of home?

“Yeah, of course it does,” he replies. “But it’s better, to be honest.”

Has he told his mother?

“No, not yet,” he says, laughing. “I can’t tell her that. I couldn’t tell her that. We have to spare our mums.”

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