Chicken Shawarma
Friday night dinner party: garlic butter pita, chicken shawarma, dubai chocolate bars - wrapping up a freezing week with chicken carving theatrics and hot buttered pita
Ryan Nordheimer•
February 16, 2026
Whenever I have people over for Friday nights I call it Shabbat-sorta. A Friday night dinner always feels distinct from any other night, so it deserves some kind of name. But calling my dinner actual Shabbat isn’t quite right either. We mix meat and dairy with a bit of reckless abandon and sometimes say all the prayers, sometimes don’t.
There’s always a sense of conflict, too: like my mind is telling me I should be going out, but for some reason, here I am choosing to stay in. When the weather drops into the range of “Air Will Easily Freeze Off Your Appendages”, I feel less of an issue not stepping outside. Staying in on Fridays feels more purposeful, more intentional, deserving of a title, and an attempt at consistency. After every Shabbat-sorta, I tell myself I want to throw more, but it’s hard to keep the regularity! One every once in a while feels good enough to me.
I built this whole meal around a very specific shawarma meat-skewer contraption-apparatus I’ve been seeing on Instagram. I’ve tried making shawarma at home in a sorta-version, either by grilling it or charring the chicken under a broiler, but it’s never nearly as good as what I could get at a pita shop. So in hopes that this new apparatus could bring me one step closer to real shawarma, I gave in to the new piece of cooking equipment that’s now shoved somewhere underneath my sink.
Turns out, this skewer pan thing is now my new best friend. I thought it was the coolest thing ever to slice and shred the chicken off of a literal spit for my friends right at the dinner table. It felt restaurant-y and sort of entertain-y yet also absurd in a good way? Mixing the tender pieces of dark meat chicken through a medley of spiced and roast vegetables, with plenty of pan juices, felt like the proper way to end a week. The options feel endless too with my new pan. Roitsserie chicken? Some kind of dessert? Who knows what else will come.
As for the rest of the menu: pickles, garlic-butter pita, labneh, and Dubai chocolate bars.
I would write more but alas I’m tied up for the next two weeks, so a bit briefer of a newsletter will have to suffice for now <3
Sorta,
Ryan
Hey! My name is Ryan Nordheimer. Welcome to my cooking and baking site. I’m a 25-year old home cook living in the East Village in New York City. Hopefully you enjoy my food through my own, tried-and-true recipes.
Ingredients (20)
Ingredients (20)
For the chicken
For the vegetables
Instructions
Place the chicken (4–5 lb), kosher salt (2 tsp), garlic (6 cloves), za’atar (¼ cup), sumac (2 Tbsp), turmeric (2 Tbsp), cumin (2 Tbsp), cinnamon (1 Tbsp), olive oil (¼ cup), yogurt (⅓ cup) into a large bowl. Toss with tongs to evenly coat.
Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least a few hours or up to 2 days.
Preheat your oven to 425 °F. Take your shawarma pan, and screw in one of the central rods. Stack your chicken thighs (4–5 lb) up on top of each other through the skewer. Pour any additional marindade on top.
Skewer on a few jalapenos, followed by a halved onion (½) turned upside-down.
Add the potato (1), fennel (2 bulbs), onion (1), lemon (1), olive oil (3 Tbsp), and 1 ½ tsp kosher salt to a large bowl.
Season with however many spicesspices you’d like. Spread evenly around the base of the shawarma pan.
Roast the shawarma until the chicken is golden, charred in several places, and registers 160 °F on a cooking thermometer, around 1.5 hours.
You can also baste the juices from the dish onto the chicken 1 or 2 times during cooking.
Slice the chicken off the skewer using a large serrated knife. Make sure to drag the pieces through the roasting juices too.
Serve with hummus, labneh, pickles, etc.
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