I'm Only Here for the Food!

Donair King
1028 Davie Street
Vancouver, BC

I will have to blame Drea from TBDFBTI on this one. While I won’t disclose the exact details of what we talked about (other than references to on-line activities), the end result was me meeting with somebody I have never met previously in the Starbucks of Davie and Thurlow. After that meeting, I realized it was a bit past my usual lunchtime! So, that gave me an interesting perspective. On a normal work day, while I could walk all the way to this area, I will seldom do this back and forth trip, as it would consume most of my lunch time. (Technically, I have flex hours so I could take a 2 hour lunch if I wanted to, as long as I put my required hours. But, why do that?). This gave me an interesting opportunity… So, after checking the nearby options, I settled for Donair King.

(For sanity sake, although donair and shawarma are not necessarily the same, I will use shawarma to refer to both for the rest of this post).

Although I took the picture *after* my lunch, still, when you see that many people enjoying their shawarma, you can’t help yourself think their ought to be something good there, right? And I am not talking about tourists (though nothing wrong with that) – I am talking about people who might work in the area, your average Joe. This is specially considering there are a lot of these shops in Downtown Vancouver! However, I sort-of had an idea what made their shawarma unique – it was more of a matter for me to confirm if that uniqueness was really that, well, unique.

With the three pictures above, it does not seem to be that different, right? Well, yes, specially if we go through a the duck test (If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck). Regardless of the looks – to an extent of some people calling it “dirty”, I made my order after a small wait. (This was because there was only one person working there, during lunch, out of all times of the day!). As for the order itself, there was one item in the item that I usually wondered how it would taste, yet never actually asked for it because, well, it is not part of your “regular” menu. In Donair King, they call it the “Chicken Mix Shawarma” – in plain terms, a regular shawarma that has also falafel stuffed in it (for $6.95). And here is my order:

Nothing different from your usual shawarmas, right? Wait, why it seems to be slightly “flattened”? And why does it looks like it has grill marks? Yup, you got it! It starts as your usual shawarma but, after it is prepared, he does not hand it to you. Rather, they have three panini grills and will grill them before serving them.

So, how is the end result? At first, I did not notice anything different. However, as I continued eating it, I noticed some unique characteristics. For example, they add pickles (which I am impartial about; however, it gave an unique twist). Also, because of the dry characteristics of the falafel, it “muted” a bit of the chicken flavour (not necessarily a bad thing here). What I found really different here was that you could not “feel” the sauces as much as that of other shawarma shops (where sometimes it seems they want to squirt the whole bottle into the wrap). However, this did not end up being a bad thing, as it allowed me to savour the other components that, otherwise, would have be drowned.

Overall, yes, it was unique and, yes, I liked it. Would I come back? While walking all the way from my workplace just for a shawarma might be stretching it, otherwise, I would grab one from this shop.