What is De Babel?
De Babel is the Middle Eastern counter at 14884 N Pima Road, Suite 135, in a plaza on the east side of Pima Road just north of Raintree Drive, pressed up against the 101 in the Airpark. It opened on July 13, 2021, and within two years was the only Scottsdale restaurant on Yelp’s list of the 100 best places to eat in the country, at No. 39 for 2023. The restaurant says it has made that list five years running.
The owner is Marwan Kandeel, a native of Jordan who spent more than 25 years in food and beverage, including time with Cinnabon and Five Guys, before opening a restaurant of his own. He was a first-time owner and he chose the location like one who knew the business: Scottsdale Airpark News reported in September 2021 that he picked the hidden spot deliberately, to see whether customers would make the effort to find it. They did, seven days a week, and the plaza’s anonymity became part of the story.
The food is fast-casual Levantine, strictly halal, and made to order. Hand-carved shawarma, crisp falafel, lamb kafta, lamb tikka and chicken tawook come as sandwiches, entrées over basmati rice, or on salads; the signature sandwiches carry names like the DXB Tawook and the Late Night Chicken, the fries are fresh-cut (truffle cheese optional), and dessert is baklava, Nutella pita, rice pudding or tahini ice cream. The dining room is small and the office crowd from the Airpark eats a lot of it at desks and in cars.
In 2026 Kandeel finally grew. The Phoenix Business Journal reported on July 8 that De Babel would open a flagship at The Edge, 8980 N 90th Street, four miles south along the freeway, with a bigger room, a central kitchen and commissary, and a market of Middle Eastern groceries. By fall the company’s website listed it as open, with the halal market inside. “We’ve never believed in growing for the sake of growth,” Kandeel said. Our verdict: De Babel is the best shawarma counter in Scottsdale and one of the few 2020s openings here that earned a national ranking without a publicist or a patio.
Ordering at De Babel
Order the tawook. Chicken tawook, the marinated grilled chicken of the Levant, is what Yelp’s 2023 citation and KTAR’s report both named first, and it is the sandwich to start with. The signature version is the DXB Tawook; the plain one is on the classic list. The chicken shawarma is carved off the spit to order and was the second most-cited dish. For lamb, choose between lamb tikka (grilled chunks) and lamb kafta (ground, spiced, skewered). A Mix Grill Platter covers several at once and is the plate in the company’s own expansion photos.
Round it out. The appetizer list is short: hummus, baba ghanoush (the kitchen’s own pick), falafel by the piece, fried cauliflower and bamieh, a stewed okra you will not find at most Valley counters. Salads are chopped, cauliflower or taboulih. The fries are fresh-cut and the truffle cheese fries are the indulgence. Desserts are baklava, Nutella pita, rice pudding and the tahini ice cream that regulars push. Everything is halal; there is no alcohol. The restaurant does not publish prices online, and the press we found never quoted them; figure a sandwich and fries in the mid-teens and a plate in the low twenties, which puts it in the same bracket as Pita Jungle on Shea.
Timing. Hours at Pima Road are Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., and the counter is closed Sunday. The Edge opens an hour earlier at 10. Weekday lunch is the rush, with the Scottsdale Airport and Raintree office parks emptying into the plaza between noon and one; early dinner is calm. Order online for pickup if you are on a lunch hour.
Getting there. The plaza sits behind the frontage buildings on the east side of Pima between Raintree and Thunderbird, with the 101 sound wall at its back. Parking is the plaza lot. If you are staying near the Airpark, see our guide to hotels near the Scottsdale Airpark; it is a five-minute drive from most of them.
Pick the location for the job. Pima Road is the original, the fastest and the one with the reviews. The Edge, at 8980 N 90th Street, Suite 124, is the larger, more contemporary room, with the Middle Eastern market (some packaged goods there are kosher-certified; the kitchen is halal) and the central kitchen that now supplies both. Same menu at both, by the owner’s design.
The counter that let Yelp find it
The Airpark has always eaten at strip-mall counters, and most of them are forgotten within a lease. What made De Babel different was that it arrived with a professional’s playbook and a first-timer’s stubbornness. Kandeel’s 25 years with Cinnabon and Five Guys taught him made-to-order consistency and the discipline of a short menu; his decision to open in a plaza nobody could see from Pima Road was a bet that quality would do the marketing. Scottsdale Airpark News caught the restaurant two months in, already busy. Yelp’s algorithm caught it eighteen months later. The No. 39 ranking on the 2023 Top 100, reported by KTAR on January 26 of that year, put a halal shawarma counter from a hidden Scottsdale plaza ahead of hundreds of better-funded rooms, and De Babel has stayed on the list since, by its own account, five years in a row.
That matters for how Scottsdale’s Middle Eastern food has developed. The city’s earlier reference points were sit-down and Persian or Lebanese; the fast-casual, halal, Gulf-inflected counter (DXB in the sandwich name is the Dubai airport code) is a 2020s arrival, and De Babel is its clearest Scottsdale example. The customers it drew were the Airpark’s own: the office parks along Raintree and Pima at lunch, and the neighborhoods east of the freeway at dinner.
The expansion was slow by design. Kandeel spent five years, as the Business Journal put it, refining operations at one store before adding a second. When he did, in July 2026, he built it as infrastructure: a central kitchen and commissary at The Edge to produce fresh daily for both locations and any future ones, a retail market of Middle Eastern products, and a bigger dining room to serve as the brand’s flagship. “Our goal isn’t simply to open more restaurants,” he said. “Opening at The Edge represents the beginning of our next chapter.” The record does not say how many locations he intends or whether franchising is on the table; nor does any article we found print a menu price, which is unusual for a restaurant this well reviewed.
Honest assessment: De Babel is a counter, not a dining room, and it should be judged as one. The chicken tawook and shawarma are the best of their kind in the city, the halal kitchen is a real service in a town short on them, and the hidden location is now a feature regulars enjoy. The Edge store has the room and the market; Pima Road has the history. Either way it earns its place on the short list of Scottsdale restaurants that got famous without ever trying to look expensive.