Levantine Grill

Most shawarma counters name themselves after the sandwich. Levantine Grill named itself after the region the sandwich comes from, and the menu spends its length making good on the larger word. Order the chicken shawarma wrap in its Levantine style and the ambition shows up immediately: chicken sliced from the spit, then fries, pickles, turnip, and garlic sauce rolled into the same bread. The restaurant opened on Charlotte Street in downtown Peterborough in February 2022, and the menu now runs from wraps and bowls through kafta platters, manakesh-style pies, and a long bench of salads, all of it listed on an online ordering page built for pickup and local delivery.

The wraps anchor the order. Beside the Levantine-style chicken there is a regular-style version, a falafel wrap built from chickpeas and fava with herbs, tabbouleh, pickles, turnip, tahini, and garlic sauce, and a beef kafta kebab wrap of grilled ground beef pressed onto skewers over charcoal. The chicken shawarma bowl and the chicken shawarma poutine carry the same spit-roasted profile into fork-and-fries territory. Platters move the meal up a register: a falafel platter of four falafel over rice, fries, or bulgur with hummus or baba ghanoush, and the Levantine Special Kafta Kebab Platter, two skewers of mixed spiced kafta finished with grilled sweet pepper, onion, and tomato sauce.

What separates this kitchen from a wrap-only counter is the part of the menu most shawarma stops skip. The pies, baked manakesh-style on flat dough, run from a sujuk and cheese pie of extra-lean ground beef and sujuk spice to a zaatar pie of dried thyme, oregano, marjoram, and toasted sesame in olive oil. The pie list stretches further, to sfiha, halloumi, and garlic cheese, a manakesh range most quick counters never bother to build. The salads do real work as well: tabbouleh chopped fine from parsley and bulgur, fattoush layered with fried pita and olives under a balsamic or apple-vinegar dressing. These are the dishes that mark the food as specifically Levantine rather than generically Middle Eastern.

The breadth pays off in two directions. A vegetarian table is not stuck with a single fallback: the falafel wrap and falafel platter, hummus, tabbouleh, fattoush, and the zaatar pie add up to a full order rather than a consolation. The salad bench runs further still, into eggplant, artichoke, olive, and a chicken shawarma Caesar that folds the house specialty into a North American salad. And the whole thing is built to leave the building — wraps, bowls, pies, and platters all travel, family trays turn the grill into a group meal, and the online page treats pickup and local delivery as a default rather than an afterthought.

That specificity has a source. Local reporting from the restaurant''s opening tied Levantine Grill to two Syrian co-owners, Imad Mahfouz and Hashem Yakan, who carried family recipes from Damascus to Peterborough — one arriving from a banking background, the other trained in the kitchen. The recipes came with them; the storefront was the new part. The restaurant does not publish a current chef, so the food itself carries the claim, and the public site still posts a halal logo for the diners who look for one.

On a weeknight the order resolves fast — a wrap, a salad, maybe a pie to split — which is part of why it reads as a habit rather than an occasion. The shawarma poutine is the rule-bender, cheese curds and gravy under spit-roasted chicken, Canadian comfort wearing a Levantine coat. The menu rewards the slower order too: a spread of platters with hummus, fattoush, and a few pies, or a family tray carried out the door for a group. Baklava ends it the way it ends most Levantine meals. Downtown Peterborough is not short on quick lunches; this is the one that keeps the regional cooking intact on the way through.