Dubai chocolate bars, falafel and magic chicken on a Little Arabia food crawl in Orange County

We’re lucky to live in a place with dozens of cultural hubs. There’s Cambodia Town in Long Beach, Little Ethiopia on Fairfax Avenue or Little Saigon in Westminster.

Part of what makes Southern California great is the establishment of deep-rooted communities, where someone can connect with the home they may have left thousands of miles away.

It is possible to walk down a single street and experience and embrace a world entirely different from your own.

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Aug. 26, 2024

Anaheim is home to thousands of Arab Americans from all over West Asia, including Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Palestine. In 2022, after decades of lobbying for an official designation by Arab American advocates and business owners, the Anaheim City Council recognized a mile-long stretch of Brookhurst Street between Broadway and Ball Road as Little Arabia.

During my time at UC Irvine, I visited the area countless times for shawarma wraps and stacks of lahm bi ajeen for parties. I recently returned on a mission to find exemplary flatbreads, falafel and the TikTok-famous Dubai chocolate bars.

Feel free to treat this as a blueprint for a Little Arabia food crawl, or a list of places to hit whenever you’re in Anaheim. I was traveling with a cooler for leftovers and friends who were eager to help me try as much as we could in an afternoon.

First stop: Shawarma wraps at Zait & Zaatar

A beef shawarma plate from Zait & Zaatar in Anaheim.

(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)

Two massive spits of chicken and beef shawarma rotate slowly behind the counter at Zait & Zaatar, a fast-casual restaurant just north of Little Arabia. It boasts bowls of foul in the morning, a full bakery and a menu of wraps, sandwiches, plates and bowls. But with the glistening meats in the direct line of sight of anyone ordering at the register, it’s difficult to focus on anything else.

The beef shawarma comes tightly wrapped with sliced onion, tomato, parsley and tahini in a flaky bread as thin and pliable as a flour tortilla. It’s toasted on two sides until bronzed and the meat is warm enough to soften the onions and melt the tahini.

The beef has a slightly sour tang and nicely caramelized edges. If you order the plate, the wrap comes on a board with a heap of French fries and sliced pickles. After watching a group at a nearby table shove the fries into their shawarma wraps, I did the same. It turned out to be a pro move, and I don’t believe in wasting French fries.

Second stop: Saturday musakhan from Al Baraka

A spread of dishes from Al Baraka, including from left, the muhammara, lagneh, hummus, olives and the Saturday special of musakhan in the center.

(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)

If you want the magic chicken, you need to plan your crawl on a Saturday. That’s the only day of the week that owners Aref and Magida Shatarah offer musakhan, a chicken dish so mindbogglingly excellent, I (and anyone I’ve ever brought to try it) call it magic chicken.

I learned of Al Baraka from Times critic Bill Addison, who featured the restaurant on last year’s 101 Best Restaurants list. Here, the tables are filled with dishes you’ll typically see in a Palestinian home.

Musakhan is a classic Palestinian dish of roasted chicken perfumed with sumac and served over flatbread smothered with caramelized onions. At Al Baraka, this one plate of chicken is reason enough to drive an hour down the 5 Freeway.

The chicken tastes like it’s been roasting for hours, with a long-developed flavor and meat that easily slips from the bone. The bread underneath is equal parts crisp and chewy, blanketed in a deep purple mash of sumac and onion.

At first, the dish is so tart it makes your lips pucker, flooding your mouth with the piquant punch of the sumac and onion paste. The effect quickly becomes addictive. I needed it on every scrap of flatbread, the chicken, mixed into my labneh and on top of rice.

There are equally compelling specials every other day of the week. But for magic chicken, I’ll see you there on Saturday.

Third stop: Dubai chocolate bars and knafeh at Knafeh Cafe

A slice of knafeh from Knafeh Cafe in Anaheim.

(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)

For months now, my TikTok For You page has been flooded with videos of people dramatically breaking apart Dubai chocolate bars, trying to re-create Dubai chocolate bars and obsessing over where to get Dubai chocolate bars. For the uninitiated, it’s a chocolate bar filled with crispy kataifi (shredded phyllo dough) suspended in a sweet and chunky pistachio spread.

The original bar was created by Sarah Hamouda of Fix Dessert Chocolatier in Dubai. Videos of people eating the actual bars and similar re-creations have racked up millions of views on TikTok. And you can now find them at a handful of dessert shops in the Little Arabia area, including at Knafeh Cafe.

The gold foil-wrapped bars are tucked away in a refrigerator, so don’t assume they’ve run out if there aren’t any on display. It looks like a solid bar of milk chocolate, but when you crack it open, the center is filled with a sweet, grainy paste of kataifi and pistachio. It has all the components of an excellent candy bar, with smooth milk chocolate and a crisp, nutty center that’s just the right balance of salty and sweet. About two seconds into my first bite, I decided that the internet obsession was appropriately reasonable.

But I couldn’t leave the Knafeh Cafe without at least one square of knafeh. I ordered it warmed up for a few seconds in the microwave so that the cheese started to ooze out of the middle. It’s a texturally superb dessert, with crunchy strands of phyllo dough, gooey cheese and a sticky, sweet syrup.

Fourth stop: Flatbreads from Al Amir Bakery

A za’atar and cheese flatbread from Al Amir Bakery in Anaheim.

(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)

The wooden peels at Al Amir Bakery look like they’re five feet long, thrust in and out of the oven with about a dozen breads at a time. There are six-inch mini breads topped with sojouk, cheese, za’atar and even chipotle chicken. Full-sized breads as big as large pizzas emerge bubbling with cheese or steaming with ground beef, tomato and onions.

In a room off to the side of the bakery, there are enough mini flatbreads stacked on sheet trays to supply every Costco in the surrounding area. I ask if there is a big party coming through. No, that’s just the amount they need to make it through the afternoon.

The cheese and za’atar bread is painted with the green, tart, herb-intensive spice blend. The sandy paste sits under a blend of mild white cheeses that melt in tiny blobs all over the surface of the flatbread.

The dough is pillowy soft and a little sweet, making the unadorned crusts just as tempting as the middle.

Fifth stop: Falafel pita from Sababa Falafel Shop

A falafel sandwich from Sababa Falafel Shop in Anaheim.

(Jenn Harris / Los Angeles Times)

Sababa Falafel Shop is technically outside the official Little Arabia borders, but shouldn’t be missed. There always seems to be a dozen people behind the counter and about 18 too many cars in the parking lot. The line wraps around and nearly out the door and before you can place your order, the person closest to you behind the counter will hand you a steaming hot falafel to sample.

The golf-ball sized orb of fried chickpeas fractures on contact and crumbles into a tender, herb-flecked mash. Owner Salah Othman wanted to re-create the falafel he ate growing up in Ramallah, the Palestinian city in the West Bank.

“Every morning, we would stop at a falafel shop and get a half pita stuffed with falafels and eat on the way,” he told Times reporter Gabriel San Román earlier this year. “Those memories became something that created a taste in my palate. I had to have it. As I grew older, I always wanted that flavor.”

You can pretend to contemplate your order while you finish your sample, but you know, and the guy waiting to stuff your pita knows what you’re going to order: One falafel pita, Sababa style.

The person building your sandwich will split the pita pocket until it resembles a gaping crater and stuff it with red cabbage, hummus, parsley, cucumber and tomato salad, pickles, tahini and enough falafel balls to keep you satiated for the rest of the afternoon and through dinner. It’s an overflowing, drippy mess that requires both hands and a stack of napkins.

The Arabic translation for the word “sababa” is displayed on a wall of the restaurant. “Amazing.” “Excellent.” “Awesome.”

The entire afternoon was all those things, and so was the falafel sandwich.