Souq Lebanese Grill

Layered penne under ground beef, bechamel, and melted mozzarella is not the dish most people go looking for at a Lebanese grill, and at Souq it sits a few lines below the shawarma. The Bechamel Pasta is the first clue that this Howard Avenue kitchen in Windsor cooks wider than its category suggests; Jwaneh, grilled chicken wings dressed in garlic sauce, is the second. Between those two runs a menu that travels from dips and salads through charcoal skewers, bowls, wraps, and shareable platters. The effect is less a single-order counter than a generous table — the kind of place where a group that cannot settle on one thing still finds everyone a plate.

The dips are the foundation. Hummus and Baba Ghanoush, the charbroiled eggplant pureed with tahini and lemon, and a Garlic Dip of pureed fresh garlic that doubles as the condiment for everything off the grill; Fattoush and Tabouli to brighten the table; grape leaves and a velvety lentil soup for the plant-based corner. The charcoal does the heavy lifting from there. Shish Tawook, beef shish kabob, and Kufta of ground beef and lamb each arrive two skewers to a plate, while the Mix Grill brings all three at once with garlic, pita, pickles, turnips, and rice or fries. Shawarma — chicken, beef, or mixed — turns up three ways: rolled into a twelve-inch wrap, spread across an entrée plate, or built into the Shawarma Fattoush Bowl, where the salad carries hummus, pickles, and a choice of protein into one full meal. For anyone who wants the grill in a single hand, there are Arayes, seasoned ground beef baked into fresh pita.

What keeps the board from reading like a standard shawarma counter is how much it gives to comfort food and the care stated behind it. Bechamel Pasta anchors a warmer lane that runs through Moussaka, roasted eggplant layered with ground beef, and Kubbah, the bulgur-shelled meat pie served with yogurt — dishes that ask for a fork and a slower meal than a wrap allows. The kitchen reaches past the Levant, too, into Chicken Tikka and a mild Butter Chicken over rice. Souq's own pledge is to cook scratch-made in-store, sourcing Ontario meats, Canadian dairy, grains and eggs, and seasonal Canadian produce. It is the kind of commitment that is easy to print and harder to honour, and the menu's range reads like a kitchen that works rather than assembles.

Souq opened on Howard Avenue in October 2018, and its standing in Windsor has been built as much in the community as in the dining room. Owner Ghasan Bassiso, named in local reporting, helped lead the Windsor-Essex effort to raise money for Lebanon; by the account of the coverage at the time, the response left organizers overwhelmed by how much of the city turned out. Souq logs the work publicly too — its sponsorships and community aid listed alongside the menu.

The weekday Lunch Plate is the most efficient way into all of this — shish kabob or shawarma with fattoush, rice, garlic, pickles, turnips, and pita, priced for a midday meal and built to be eaten in one sitting. It is the full table in miniature, and it scales up cleanly: the same kitchen lays out catering spreads and family platters when the order grows from one person to a crowd. Souq spent its first years making the quiet case that a neighbourhood grill can be both things at once — the quick wrap on a Tuesday and the platter-covered table when the family arrives, the takeout bag and the fundraiser. Seen against all of that, the Bechamel Pasta was never the outlier on the menu. It was the clearest line on it.