Best Middle East Restaurant and Bakeries in the Southwest Suburbs

My favorite places to enjoy Middle Eastern food, at a restaurant or that you can pick up freshly made while driving or commuting to work in the morning.

Feb 27, 2024

By Ray Hanania

Free/Culture/Monday Feb. 26, 2024

The one question is get most asked as a writer is not the rone you might expect or about politics. It's not who is right or wrong int he Middle East conflict.

The big question from readers is, what is Middle Eastern food and where is the best place to get it.

There are a lot of restaurants and several great bakeries that make authentic tasting Middle East foods.

My favorite restaurant is Zwar at 9328 W. 159th Street in Orland Park, adjacent to the Jewel Osco shopping mall.

They have the best all around Mediterranean menu and it is very affordable, too.

I have written about them before and they were spotlighted by NBC TV food critic Steve Dolinsky in September 2022.

Click here to view Dolinsky’s report.

But, you don't have to go to a sit-down restaurant to enjoy good Middle Eastern food.

There are many Arabian bakeries that offer a wide range of foods that includes stuffed Grape Leaves, various salads including Tabouli, hummus dip, freshly made bread, and Cross (triangular enclosed bread pies that include meat, cheese and spinach), and Sfeeha, min-pizza's of meat, cheese or Za'atar, which is a tasty blend of savory dried spices and herbs like oregano, marjoram, thyme or cumin.

Kibbeh

They also sell Kibbeh (or Kubbah) which is an outer crusted football shaped deep fried made of bulgur wheat (fine (aka crushed wheat) and Kamouneh (aka Green Bulgur mix). It is usually filled with chunks of lamb or beef and toasted almond slivers or toasted pine nuts.

Don't listen to those people who tell you that it's ok to have ground beef in the Kibbeh. It's not the preferred meat, which is ground or chunks of lamb. There is a movement away from lamb, because it is growing in expense, and towards ground beef, which makes the Kibbeh inferior in quality.

There is only one place that make kibbeh filled with lamb chunk and that is the Orland Bakery at 9005 E. 151st Street. No one makes Kibbeh better than them.

But there are two other great Middle East bakeries that offer a wide selection of Middle Eastern bakery products. They include the Oasis Bakery at 7758 W. 95th Street in Hickory Hills, and Harlem Food Fresh Bakery at 9250 S. Harlem.

These are the three best Middle Eastern bakeries.

They will also make stuffed grape leaves for you that are perfect and not mushy. Many of the other bakeries make mushy riced stuffed grape leaves, hiring on-Arabs to do the rolling and stuffing.

The perfect stuffed grape leaf is made with fresh grape leaves (Ziyad Brothers grape leaves in the jar are the next best thing to freshly picked vine leaves). You mix diced and spiced lamb together with rice and cook 90 to 200 stuffed grape leaves in a pot OVER the boiling water. You do that by putting lamb in the pot and covering it just to the top of the meat chunks, cover them with extra grape leaves and then place the stuffed grape leaves over the blanket of spread leaves.

The worst places simply drop the grape leaves into the boiling water and the rice gets mushy. You want rice that is crisp, repeatedly rinsed of the starch, before being cooked and served.

They also make vegetarian grape leaves.

Just go into any of these bakeries and place an order. One jar of Ziyad Grape Leaves has about 90 leaves. You can buy orders of one or two jars based on how many people you are serving.

Cross is a special meat, cheese or spinach wrapped in a triangle of freshly baked bread.

Sfeeha is a round flattened bread that has meat, za'atar or even chicken on top, like a mini pizza.

The popularity of these food items is out of this world. They are very tasty. And, these three Middle Eastern bakeries make the kibbeh, Cross and Sfeeha early in the morning so if you are driving to work, or commuting, you can swing by and buy freshly made menu selections to take with you to work.

There are a few other places where you can go, but I strongly recommend these three locations:

· Orland Bakery at 9005 E. 151st Street in Orland Park

· Oasis Bakery at 7758 W. 95th Street in Hickory Hills

· Harlem Food Fresh Bakery at 9250 S. Harlem in Bridgeview (Little Palestine).

You can always go to a restaurant for a nice sit-down meal. My favorite is Zwar. The food is always fresh. And you want fresh lamb, not lamb meat that has been sitting around for a week and gets mushy.

"Mushy" is the worst texture for Middle Eastern foods.

Check out these places and tell the owners I said hello.

You won't be disappointed.

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