What is Green Corner Restaurant?
Green Corner Restaurant is the Levantine counter at 10392 N Scottsdale Road, on the east side of Scottsdale Road just south of Shea Boulevard, in the Scottsdale Commons center. It opened at the end of May 2022 in the space that had been Porkopolis Bar-B-Que since 2016, and it was the third location of a small East Valley chain that an uncle and nephew had started in a Mesa strip mall six years earlier.
The uncle is Ebrahim Takkem, a chef from Syria who came to the United States in 2011 with more than 15 years of cooking behind him and, by every account, a long-held wish for a restaurant of his own. The nephew is Ash Abu Sharkh, who arrived from Jordan in 2014 to work on a master’s degree in computers and ended up behind a counter instead. “People appreciate what it is we do here,” he told the Daily Independent. The first Green Corner opened in early 2016 at the northeast corner of Alma School and Southern in Mesa; its corner spot gave the business its name, and “green” was meant to say healthy, fresh and tasty. Within six months, Abu Sharkh said, they could not keep up with customers, and the company grew from three employees to 50. Chandler followed in May 2018, then Scottsdale, then Eastmark and Tempe.
The food is the cooking of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, served fast-casual. Beef and chicken shawarma come on handmade saj flatbread, cooked on the domed griddle the bread is named for; there are lamb kafta, chicken and beef kebabs, gyros, falafel, kibbeh, stuffed grape leaves, hummus and baba ghanoush, lamb chops, and the al-Sham sandwiches named for Damascus. Takkem writes every recipe. Every entrée ends with a free piece of house-made baklava, a detail ABC15 led with when the Scottsdale location was announced.
The Shea Corridor is Scottsdale’s medical-office district, and Green Corner feeds it at lunch the way Pita Jungle a mile east has for two decades, at a lower price and with a shorter menu. Our verdict: the best shawarma within a mile of Shea and Scottsdale Road, in a room that makes no claims beyond that.
Ordering at Green Corner
Order the shawarma on saj. The beef shawarma is the dish the company led with in Scottsdale and the one to judge it by: thin-carved, spiced, wrapped in or served beside the handmade saj bread. On the published menu the beef shawarma plate is $17.25, the chicken plate $15.49, the mixed plate $17.49, and the sandwiches $7.99 to $8.49. The al-Sham beef sandwich ($13.99) and chicken ($13.49) are the house specialties if you want a bigger sandwich than a wrap.
Or get the combo. The Green Corner Combo ($21.49) is one skewer each of lamb kafta kebab and chicken kebab, four chunks of beef and a falafel, with rice, Greek salad, hummus and pita; it is the plate for a first visit. The kebab plates on their own run $17.49 to $18.99, the gyro plate (Chicago-style or classic) $15.49, the falafel plate $15.49 and the lamb chops $21.49 with three sides. Appetizers are hummus from $6.99, baba ghanoush from $7.49, stuffed grape leaves $8.99, Greek fries $7.99 and the fried bulgur-and-beef kibbeh at $10.99. Baklava is $1.49 on the menu and free with every meal; knafeh is the other dessert.
Drinks are fountain only. Mouth by Southwest noted that at the Chandler opening in 2018, and it still holds: no beer, no wine, no Turkish coffee. This is a counter, not a café.
Timing. Hours are Monday through Saturday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. The lunch rush from the Shea medical offices and the Scottsdale Commons tenants runs noon to 1:30, and because everything is made to order, a plate takes several minutes at the peak. Abu Sharkh’s own description: not fast food, you have to wait. Mid-afternoon is the quiet window. Delivery through the apps is heavy; Uber Eats shows a 4.7 rating from more than 1,500 orders at this location, and Yelp has it near the top of Scottsdale’s Mediterranean listings with roughly 1,800 reviews.
Getting there. Scottsdale Commons has its own lot off Scottsdale Road, south of the Shea intersection; enter from Scottsdale Road rather than Shea. The address carries a Paradise Valley zip code, 85253, though it is in the City of Scottsdale. Sushi on Shea and the rest of the Shea and Scottsdale Road restaurant cluster are within a few blocks if your group splits.
An East Valley counter crosses into Scottsdale
Green Corner’s story is a familiar one in the Valley’s immigrant restaurant trade, and it is worth telling plainly because the press has told it only in fragments. Takkem arrived from Syria in 2011, the year the war there began, and spent five years working toward the restaurant he wanted. Abu Sharkh came from Jordan three years later for graduate school. The Mesa corner they opened in early 2016 was a bet on an East Valley audience that already knew Levantine food from a generation of earlier counters, and it paid off fast enough that Chandler came in two years and Scottsdale in six.
Scottsdale was the step up. Scottsdale Commons at Scottsdale Road and Shea is a different market from Alma School and Southern, and the space they took had a history: Porkopolis, the Valley barbecue chain, had opened there in 2016 and left it by spring 2022. What Now reported the lease on May 9, 2022, and ABC15 ran the owners’ story with the baklava policy and the saj bread as the hooks. The Scottsdale room opened at the end of that month as the third Green Corner, and by the company’s own listing it has run the same hours and menu as the East Valley stores since.
Growth continued from there. A fourth site at Eastmark in southeast Mesa was announced in November 2024 with an end-of-2025 target, and in August 2025 What Now reported a Tempe location at 777 S College Avenue, in the former Nocawich near ASU, which the Tempe Independent listed among downtown Tempe’s new restaurants the following summer. Five locations in ten years, all counter-service, all built on Takkem’s recipes, is a serious run for a business that started with three employees.
What the record does not say is as notable as what it does. No Phoenix New Times, Phoenix Magazine or AZCentral critic has reviewed Green Corner in any location; its reputation is entirely customer-built, through Yelp, Uber Eats and word of mouth around the Shea medical offices. Nobody has printed Takkem’s age, his training in Syria or where he cooked before 2016. The Scottsdale opening date is “late May 2022” because the owners said so beforehand and nobody reported the first day.
Honest assessment: Green Corner is a good, honest, inexpensive Levantine counter that happens to sit on one of Scottsdale’s busiest corners, and it should be judged as exactly that. The shawarma and saj bread are better than the price, the kebabs are reliable, the room is plain and the drinks are from a fountain. It is the right lunch on a workday south of Shea and a sensible family dinner at seven. It is not a destination, and the owners, who built a five-store chain without ever courting a critic, do not seem to mind. The 2020s Shea Corridor is better for having it.