April Restaurant of the Month: Open Sesame

From Long Beach to Los Angeles, Southern California’s most delicious Lebanese-inspired restaurant chain is gearing up for another busy season. Open Sesame, having recently celebrated its seventeenth birthday, is a collection of inviting eateries offering cultural immersion and a wide array of delicious cuisine.

Having originally opened in Long Beach, Lebanese Founder Ali Kobeissi sought to create a restaurant that blended the authentic food of his heritage into a trendy establishment with an inviting aura. And so, after garnering much popularity among the Long Beach set, and in an effort to expand from the coastal community of the LBC, Kobeissi took his shawarma and headed north to Los Angeles-proper two years ago to trendy Beverly Boulevard, which is also the location we are recommending as our must-go-to spot for April.

One of the things that can easily set a restaurant apart from its competitors is freshness and quality of ingredients; if we’re eating two day old chicken, we can tell. Open Sesame, however, doesn’t believe in sacrificing convenience for taste. All of their meals are prepared fresh, early each morning, by a team of loyal chefs and cooks, just in time to open their doors to the masses for their popular lunch hour.

So what are the tastiest offerings on the menu? The chicken shawarma and chicken tawook rank among the most popular – and with good reason. Both offer extremely flavorful marinated chicken served with your choice of original recipe hummus, spicy hummus, or baba ghannouj, and selection of salad. Trust THIS: chicken shawarma with baba ghannouj and tabouleh. The tender chicken pieces complements the raw smokiness of the baba ghonnouj perfectly and the tabouleh is just the right contrast, offering a light and crispy flavor to the dish. Roasted on a split with Open Sesame’s signature marinade, then sliced off as the orders fly in, the chicken shawarma retains both its flavor and tenderness throughout the dinner shift.

And then there’s the crack. Yes, that’s right, Open Sesame produces its own crack. Pure white, sinfully addictive, velvety, thick, flavorful, and…garlicky!? Indeed. The garlic sauce, nicknamed “the crack” by frequent patrons, might just be the most delicious accoutrement to the meal. A little goes a long way, perfect to dip your shawarma or pita in, and we challenge you to try and not ask for more of it.

What’s even more exciting is that Open Sesame has partnered with Uber Eats so you can enjoy their signature dishes on the go, having them delivered to whatever location you might be in during the day. Furthering the expansion still, a new Torrance location will soon be added to the mix early this summer in the Del Amo Fashion Center to offer shoppers a taste of traditional Lebanese fare whilst they shop.

Make sure to head in on Wednesdays for selected half price wine bottles and cocktails all evening long. And trust us, with the baklava for dessert, you can’t go wrong. Stop in this month and tell them Hamptons to Hollywood sent you 😉