Middle East & North Africa

Meat — chicken, beef, lamb, or a mixture — marinated in spices (cumin, coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamom) and slow-roasted on a vertical rotating spit for hours, then shaved thin with a long blade as orders come in. Wrapped in flatbread (pita or taboon) with pickled turnips (turnip pickles that turn neon pink from beet juice), tomato, cucumber, parsley, tahini or toum (garlic sauce). The shawarma spread throughout the Ottoman Empire and is now global — differentiated by region in its spice profile, meat composition, and accompaniments.

Crispy deep-fried balls or discs of ground chickpeas (or fava beans in the Egyptian tradition) seasoned with cumin, coriander, parsley, and garlic, wrapped in pita with chopped salad, pickles, tahini, and hot sauce. The falafel wrap is one of the most widely eaten street foods on earth — cheap, protein-rich, vegetarian by default, and available from Tel Aviv to London to New York. The Egyptian ta'ameya uses fava beans; the Levantine version uses chickpeas or a mix.

Fried eggplant, hard-boiled egg, hummus, tahini, Israeli salad (chopped cucumber and tomato), and the essential and distinctive amba — a pungent, tangy Iraqi pickled mango sauce — all in a pita pocket. The sabich was brought to Israel by Iraqi Jewish immigrants in the 1940s and 50s, who ate it as a Shabbat cold meal. Givatayim, near Tel Aviv, is its acknowledged home. The combination of flavors — creamy eggplant, rich egg, bitter tahini, sour amba — is unlike anything else in the sandwich world.

A Lebanese flatbread baked with za'atar (a blend of wild thyme, sumac, and sesame seeds) mixed with olive oil spread over the surface. Often eaten folded in half or around fillings of white cheese (akawi or Akkawi), tomato, and mint, making it a functional breakfast sandwich. The manakish baked at a furn (community wood oven) and eaten on the way to work is the Lebanese equivalent of the croissant on the way to the office.

Pita bread stuffed with spiced raw or lightly cooked minced lamb (kafta-style, with onion, parsley, and spices), then grilled directly on charcoal until the meat cooks through and the pita gets charred and crispy. The fat from the lamb renders into the bread, creating something simultaneously crispy outside and juicy inside. Arayes are the street food version of kafta on a grill.

A uniquely Algerian street food: a savory chickpea flour cake (similar to socca or panisse) baked in a large square pan, sliced into pieces, placed in a bread roll (often a French baguette — another colonial legacy) with harissa, cumin, and sometimes a runny egg. Dense, filling, and deeply satisfying, the karantika is the Algerian working-class breakfast sandwich.

A spiced lamb or beef sausage — merguez — seasoned with harissa, cumin, fennel, and red pepper, grilled and served in a baguette. The baguette is a direct inheritance from French colonialism; the merguez is entirely North African. Their combination is one of the great colonial-culinary syntheses. Available at street stalls throughout the Maghreb and in Maghrebi immigrant communities across France.