Street Eats is a little cafe in the Amazon Doppler building near the Spheres. The Seattle restaurant has spent the past few years in an identity crisis.

First opened in 2016 as a vegetarian juice bar called Anar, the space limped through COVID, toggling between being closed and opening for limited hours, searching for customers when its target audience was primarily working from home. And the menu wasn’t clicking. 

Anar was “open for a solid year” with mediocre sales, says Ángela Ortez-Zarate of Mama Restaurant Group — owners of Street Eats, Mamnoon, Mbar and more — but the company was reluctant to close it because “it was such a jewel in the Mama family.” 

“We were offering three different juices and the same salads and snacks, but no one was showing up,” said Ortez-Zarate. 

Now known as Street Eats, the space has finally found its footing as a Lebanese-Mexican cafe (aka Leb-Mex), organically meshing Levantine and Mexican flavors. But it didn’t come easy, as the restaurant underwent menu changes, name changes and middling sales. 

The Street Eats concept draws on a rich history of fusion between these cuisines — and through relationships developed at the restaurant, they’re throwing their own flavors into the mix. Now, they’re confidently going forward, having found their secret sauce.

Refining the recipe 

Ortez-Zarate first worked at Mama’s flagship Mamnoon as a line cook when she was in culinary school in 2015. Years later, after being furloughed from a job because of the pandemic, she applied to be a kitchen manager at Mamnoon Street — but pitched herself to help on the culinary side in addition to operations. When Ortez-Zarate was hired, her first order of business was to fully open Anar — and eventually solve the problem it had become.

Ortez-Zarate, now Mama Restaurant Group’s director of quick service development, is a self-described “food history nerd” originally from Los Angeles. She’s a Latina American with family in Guadalajara, Mexico, and El Salvador who spent much of her childhood eating vegetarian and vegan. She jokes that she just wanted to make a menu where she could “have all the sauces.”

Her solution was Street Eats, taking the cuisine of the Levant — the core of the modern-day Middle East — and giving it the Chipotle treatment. Street Eats took ingredients and tweaks that people requested at nearby sibling restaurant Mamnoon Street — a scoop of rice or extra pickled turnips with their chicken shawarma — and paired them with the popular “build your own bowl” concept.

The concept started as a pop-up in May 2022 in the Anar space and fully launched with a name change to Street Eats in February 2023. The foundation was set, but there was still fine-tuning to be done. 

The menu was wide-ranging and slightly confusing. People could choose a base (from basmati rice or hummus to greens and herbs or bread), top it with a protein like chicken, soft-boiled eggs, cauliflower or lamb, then add vegetables, pickles and, finally, sauce — including more hummus. 

There were also a few holdovers from Anar and what they called “shawarminis,” a term Mama co-owner Wassef Haroun had trademarked years prior for a small shawarma sandwich. They were initially selling the shawarminis at Mamnoon Street, but stopped once Street Eats opened to direct customers to the new restaurant.

The team quickly realized what was working and what wasn’t.

“Do we need 30 sauces? If you ask me the answer is yes,” Ortez-Zarate says with a smile, “but we needed to get to a happy medium.”

Behind the scenes, her staff was casually experimenting with their ingredients, leading to an aha moment — that showed Ortez-Zarate what Street Eats could become.  

The secret sauce 

In restaurants, “family meal” is when a cook makes food for the staff before a shift. It usually isn’t something served at the restaurant; rather, it’s a line cook’s opportunity to flex their creative muscle by using ingredients in the kitchen to whip up something comforting (and occasionally unexpected). 

At Street Eats, Ortez-Zarate found her staff consistently making tacos, calling the fresh-baked pitas “tortillas” and finding similarities in flavors that crossed cultures.

Both Lebanese and Mexican cuisines specialize in big, bold flavors. Citrus and pickled vegetables for a punch of acid and brightness, nuts for protein, crunch, or even a creaminess “that has nothing to do with dairy.”

“Pupusas or quesadillas, it’s just a stuffed pita,” Ortez-Zarate compares. “Tabbouleh is like pico de gallo.”

Ortez-Zarate and chef Jordan Parker started leaning in on the concept of Leb-Mex. They played with cauliflower al pastor and rajas tacos with halloumi, tinkered with flavors and expanded some ingredients. They swapped pine nuts for pepitas and sprinkled vibrant purple pickled onions with lemony sumac on everything.

The return of a Mama family member proved to be the final ingredient. 

Nearly a year after launching Street Eats, Mama owners Wassef and Racha Haroun’s son Azmi Haroun moved back to Seattle from Los Angeles, leaving a career in journalism to become the marketing manager for the restaurant group.

A fellow food nerd, Haroun instantly bonded with Ortez-Zarate over the idea of a Leb-Mex connection — and the tale of how the shawarma spit made its way to Mexico.

“The Ottoman Empire was ending and colonialism was taking shape in the Middle East,” Haroun says.

The French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon of 1923 caused a chain reaction of Lebanese migrants heading west in what Haroun describes as an “economic migration” that saw hundreds of thousands of Arabic-speaking Lebanese people land in Mexico over the next two decades.

“It wasn’t a harmonious blending, but there were a lot of cultural transfers — bringing the shawarma spit, which survived from Ottoman times,” Haroun says. “It was like, have you ever seen meat grilled like this?” 

“Yeah, but what if we did it with pork?” Ortez-Zarate adds, not missing a beat.

Haroun says in his own family there “has always been a mixing at the table.” His parents have Syrian, Iranian and Lebanese heritage and his paternal grandmother is part Italian. 

“Then I also had very close Mexican family friends,” Haroun says, “and there is this natural synergy, especially between Syrian, Lebanese and Mexican ingredients, and this inherent affection and playfulness in the cultures. This concept feels very natural.”

Moving ahead

Now leaning heavily into the Leb-Mex theme after a few years of refining, Street Eats has finally found its groove. 

From a business standpoint, the project makes sense. It’s a concept with a small footprint that’s easily adaptable to different scenarios — they’re planning to bring Street Eats to Bumbershoot this summer and the Mama team is considering larger-scale opportunities, like a stadium setting, further down the road.

From a personal perspective, Haroun sees Street Eats as an opportunity to further stretch the perception and understanding of Levantine food as a whole, a goal for his family and the Mama Group since opening Mamnoon in 2012.

“There are times when we’re so happy how people have embraced us, but then there’s times I wish they would go deeper to explore more,” Haroun says. “If you push too much, people are going to be like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa.’”

To that end, Ortez-Zarate is ready to kindly push. “Don’t be scared,” she says. “It’s going to be delicious. Both these cultures have amazing cuisines and it’s so nice to play with something bold. Let’s talk about salsa macha and how we made it Persian!”

These days, the Street Eats menu is more explicit about its identity; the shawarminis have been renamed Leb-Mex Tacos, for one. The “build your own bowl” section has been streamlined, and plans for future dishes continue to be tested and slowly rolled out. There are rumblings of an orange blossom concha and a “spicy” chocolate cake for the grab-and-go shelves this summer. 

And Haroun and Ortez-Zarate are so confident in the magic of their Leb-Mex mashup that, moving forward, they are leaning in with another name change: Future Street Eats locations will be known as Mamnooncita. 

“This isn’t supposed to be exclusive or shut people out,” Ortez-Zarate says of her team’s culinary and cultural fusion. “To migrate is human. The U.S. is a particular example of what that looks like — there are already 36 languages spoken in this county. If we can’t push it with food, what can we push it with?”