Paramount Fine Foods, the modern Middle Eastern restaurant serving fresh farm to table food,  recently introduced two new menu items and they invited me and a few Hamilton foodies to check it out! This wasn’t my first time coming to this location, it’s probably my fourth. So I already knew my meal was going to be delicious.

We started off our meal with a beautiful Fattoush salad, pita bread, and hummus. The salad was fresh, crisp, and tossed in a light vinaigrette. It also had bits of crunchy pita bread sprinkled throughout! The fresh and piping hot pita bread came to the table still filled with steam. We ripped it apart and devoured the lightly seasoned hummus like it was our last meal. Something about the combination made it extremely hard to stop eating… I just constantly kept shoveling hummus into my mouth until the main courses came.

The two featured items were Sujuk shwarma and Saj sandwich. Sujuk is a spiced beef sausage that’s grilled until the juices start sizzling. The meat is lean and the flavours are interesting. Our Sujuk shwarma had thin slices of the sausage, pickles, and hummus all wrapped up in a pita. The meat was lean and the flavours were interesting with strong herbs and spices. The shwarma was what I expected – bold flavours with a pop of texture from the pickles. There were onions, turnips, pickles, and their delicious garlic sauce on the side. I could slather that on anything and eat it.

The Saj sandwich was filled with grilled chicken, pickles, and hummus rolled up in a pita as well. The chicken was tender with juicy bites and exciting seasoning. Whatever it was, it was great. Again, it came with the same sides as the Sujuk shwarma. To wash this all down, I got the strawberry mango smoothie. Paramount’s smoothies are made to order and you’ll keep coming back for more. After my first sip, I knew I was going to be hooked. It’s a simple smoothie but the texture and the flavours were just addicting.

Of course, we couldn’t leave without visiting the dessert bar. We were able to go behind the counter to snap a few pictures of the beautifully presented pastries. We ended up with a plate of baklawa, kinafe, and a few cookies. I haven’t had a lot of baklawa from many places but Paramount had a huge selection with the best baklawa I’ve had. It wasn’t overly sweet and every layer of the thin phyllo crisped up perfectly. The kinafe was interesting because it was mostly cheese. It had white cheese soaked in simple syrup and in this case, it was topped with fried vermicelli. I could taste splashes of rose water in the mild bites of vemicelli and cheese. Give it a try next time!

This was a complimentary meal from Paramount Fine Foods on Upper James, opinions expressed are my own.