Barbar Tops List of CNN’s Best Kebab Joints in the World

Living in Lebanon, you can’t but eat at Barbar from time to time. Be it gorging, feasting, inhaling, or delicately snorting in your food, Barbar is the fast food joint that will leave you full of meat and bread and guilt, until of course you eat your second sandwich.

So it might come as to no surprise (or a lot of surprise) to you that CNN has recently ranked Barbar as the Best Kebab Joint in the World. Now that’s quite an honor, seeing as Barbar has beaten out competition from several other Middle Eastern countries—including Turkey, Israel, Greece and Iran.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am not an authority on all-thing kebab, but I’ve got to question CNN’s authenticity. Why Barbar—the Lebanese equivalent of McDonalds—and not a small town local kebab joint? And Egypt is famed for their kebab—”El kebab, el kebab!”—why aren’t there any Egyptian restaurants on the list?

I appreciate Barbar, I really do. But it’s lists like this where I’ve got no idea if the writer actually tried any of the locations. So Lebanon, I mark you as the jury. Is Barbar really the best Kebab joint in the world? And if not, who do you think is?