Finding Tahini Middle Eastern Street Food on an outdated map

Call it a case of mistaken identity, but I’ve been sleeping on Tahini.

A byproduct of writing about food week after week is that my brain has become a de facto restaurant map, where any given neighborhood’s landmarks are mixed up with places to eat. So when I’m driving down, say, Clairemont Mesa Boulevard, I know that when I pass the strip club, I’m next to that great ramen spot, which means I’m about to cross the freeway, which brings me to the courthouse, roughly across the street from that fast casual Middle Eastern restaurant I didn’t love.

To be clear, I’m neither spending time at the strip club nor the courthouse, and actually find their mutual proximity a little suspicious. The point is, for more than five years now, every time I’ve driven past the fast casual Middle Eastern restaurant Tahini, my brain map has been telling me not to stop. Which would be fine, except I’d never eaten at Tahini.

It didn’t even exist when I paid visits to a different fast casual Middle Eastern joint that happens to be a block farther down, on the same side of the street. (To be fair, I must have been alone in disavowing that place, because it’s still there, and still doing brisk business nearly nine years later.)

And, now that I’ve learned more about Tahini, it actually did exist at that time, but only as an overachieving street cart set up outside a gas station in Pacific Beach. There, the business’s founding partners put aside existing career plans — and in the case of one of them, a Harvard Law degree — to sling street food reflective of their shared Arabic culture. Think shawarma and falafel.

That decision may sound outlandish, but the results might warm your heart. Since setting up shop in Kearny Mesa in 2017, owners Osama Shabaik and Mahmoud Barkawi have made a point both to pay better than minimum wage, and to hire from within the refugee community. It’s tough to imagine anything that happens at the courthouse makes such a positive impact on their community.

Tahini also deals in sustainable packaging (i.e., no Styrofoam), which is great considering the counter shop operates a streamlined take-out operation. Some third of the guests I saw pass through during a lunch rush simply walked in, picked up their packaged food, and walked out. Despite this investment, and slick-looking interiors punctuated by colorful, glass mosaic lamps, prices remain entirely within reason, which these days means you can enjoy a satisfying lunch and beverage for under fifteen bucks. You may even get a falafel pita sandwich for $11 before tax and tip.

I decided to level up by ordering one of the shop’s signature sandwiches: the O.G. Pita ($13). This features Tahini’s Syrian-style steak shawarma, stuffed in a split-open flatbread with parsley, onion, tomatoes, pickled vegetables, and of course, tahini. Other options include an Egyptian-style pita featuring falafel and hummus, and “the esquire”, which combines chicken shawarma and French fries. That one got a little air time with the Food Network’s Guy Fieri, so apparently, he didn’t suffer the same Middle Eastern mix up I did.

Aside from these signature pitas, most of Tahini’s dishes are built around a conventionally fast-casual “build your own” philosophy. Meaning guests can order Middle Eastern styled rice bowls, salads, or sandwiches made with their choice of proteins and veggies. You can even hedge your bets, and order a hybrid rice and salad bowl made of half steak, half chicken. I dug into one of these topped with kalamata olives, pickled turnips, and slivered almonds (the latter cost fifty cents extra). And given everything here is made from scratch, I was able to combine the requisite garlic paste with various different tahini flavors, including cilantro, sriracha, and BBQ.

It proved to be some of the better Middle Eastern food I’ve tried outside El Cajon, coming across as fresh and flavorful, in addition to being halal. But I wasn’t about to leave without trying the falafel. These will slow down your order a bit, being that they’re also made from scratch, but they also taste like it. Rather than settling on an inert, salty and savory chick pea flour flavor, these patties are bright with green herbs, both grassy and citric. They’re idyllic foils for Tahini’s collection of sesame dressings.

This is something I would have enjoyed discovering five years ago, but at least I’m right on time to find the new, Middle Eastern styled coffee shop Shabaik and Barkawi just opened next door to Tahini. The rare café to offer both Turkish coffee and nitro cold brew, I’m not likely to mistake Finjan on the food map in my head.