A search for exceptional Syrian-style shawarma leads to the San Fernando Valley

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“Can I have my shawarma wrap made with one side of a pita?” I ask Adham Kamal, the owner of Sincerely Syria in Sherman Oaks. I gesture as if peeling the bread apart into two rounds. He nods with a knowing smile.

It’s a common request that I learned from Lebanese friends. The thinner layer superbly intensifies the wrap’s ratios. Kamal saws off shards of beef and lamb from the rotisserie behind the restaurant’s counter, spreads the half-pita with tahini and rolls the meat tightly with chopped tomatoes and pickled cucumber spears. Then he griddles the bundle on a flattop, weighted with a grill press. This batch of shawarma is juicy; he sears every angle to a deep mahogany, ensuring the ingredients stay contained.

Kamal crinkles foil around the parcel before handing it over. I rip in, not wanting the crispness to steam away. He makes wraps appealingly compact, in the style he learned working at shawarma stands in Syria, where he was raised. The meat practically sprouts out. Most bites include one or both vegetables for treble brightness, but mostly the flavors boom with earthy bass rounded out by the tahini.

Sincerely Syria is one of two recently opened Syrian-run shawarma restaurants — the other is Mama’s Shawarma in Northridge — that stand out in a city fueled by meat carved from revolving spikes and folded into flatbreads outlining our wealth of cultures.

If the concept of threading one’s meal onto a stick and cooking it over fire is as old as humankind, the method of stacking sheer, richly seasoned slices of meat on a revolving vertical skewer was popularized with the Ottoman Empire in the 1800s.