Habibi Delish

At Habibi Delish, the shawarma turns a few steps from a fryer working through poutine and onion rings, and the kitchen runs both as if they belong on one menu — which, here, they do. Chicken and beef come off the spit carved to order and folded into sandwiches, plates, and bowls; that shawarma is the anchor the rest of the menu hangs on. But this Lambton Mall Road counter is just as fluent in the Canadian diner food a Sarnia table reaches for on the same trip, and the breadth is deliberate rather than scattered. The menu is built so a group can land on a Lebanese plate, a rice bowl, or a loaded poutine without anyone having to compromise to keep the peace.

The signature is the Tony Special Plate: chicken shawarma laid over hummus and vegetables with garlic, cabbage, and pita, a full meal assembled on a single plate. From there the kitchen scales up. Rice and Chicken Supreme adds rice, turnip, pickle, and tahini beneath the same shawarma; the combo plates pair shish tawook with shish kabob, or kabob with shawarma, for a table that wants more than one thing off the grill. Lamb kafta and beef kafta skewers hold the grilled end. The crossovers are where the kitchen shows its hand — mala fries bury shawarma, hummus, garlic, and hot sauce under a pile of fries, and that same shawarma turns up again inside a poutine. Vegetarians are not an afterthought: the Vegetarian Plate runs falafel with hummus or baba ghanouj, fattoush or tabbouli, and pita, backed by a half-dozen falafel, a cabbage salad, and a garlic sauce regulars treat as a food group.

What reads off that menu is a kitchen that has settled what it is. It has worked out the difference between a long menu and a useful one — the range runs wide, but nearly every plate routes back to the shawarma, the rice, the sauces, the pita. Portions run generous, plainly built to send a diner home full, and the prep leans on the sauces and pickles that let shawarma travel: garlic, tahini, turnip, cabbage. The cooking is halal and the prices sit at the low end, an everyday combination more than an occasion one. Service is quick, the counter is unfussy, and the same orders keep coming back.

The restaurant is the current name for what Sarnia diners knew as Barakat, a lineage the kitchen still nods to: its poutine is listed under the old name. Habibi Delish opened under its present banner in 2020 and settled into a Lambton Mall Road storefront in the London Road commercial corridor, where the city does a good deal of its everyday eating. Local reporting and the restaurant's own channels frame the change as a renaming rather than a new kitchen — which tracks with a menu that reads like it has been cooked far longer than the sign out front has hung.

Most of what comes out of the kitchen is built to move. Ordering is set up to run online, and the menu — sandwiches, bowls, plates, sides, the Family Platter — is shaped for the trip home as much as for the table in front of you. The hours stretch into the late evening seven days a week, which is part of what makes the place a default rather than a plan. It is a stop that absorbs a mixed group without strain: one person gets a wrap, another a vegetarian plate, another a poutine, and the platter covers whoever is left. The line the restaurant puts on its own door is Mediterranean flavours and heartfelt hospitality, and the weeknight version of that is a plate that shows up fast and full.