Best of Sacramento 2015: Food & Drink

At Babylon City Market, Arabic is the common language. Food is the common culture.

Though it’s an Iraqi-owned store designed for the local Iraqi community—the first of its kind in Sacramento—Babylon City Market has drawn loyal followers from other Middle Eastern countries as well. English-speakers are welcome too, of course.

The full-scale market holds aisles of imported goods—spices, candies, cookies, nuts, pickles, rose water, Persian ice cream—as well as produce, cookware, a halal meat counter, hot food counter and bakery. There’s a small dining area, adorned with Middle Eastern art, and a corner filled with scarves, jewelry and traditional garb.

The biggest pull? Warm, pillowy, diamond-shaped loaves of samoon. Babylon City Market bakes the Iraqi flatbread fresh daily. On weekends, the place is swarmed with elbowing samoon-lovers, hoping to carry a bag straight home from the oven.

Weekdays are a bit more peaceful. You can watch mounds of dough puff up and turn golden brown in the large, open oven before getting tossed into a pile of bread—a pile of bread!—to eventually become shawarma sandwiches.

Loaves get sliced open and stuffed with succulent meat just carved off the vertical spit, lots of housemade pickles, hummus and garlic sauce. They’re intensely juicy—with a great tang from the pickles—unlike so many dry shawarmas around Sacramento. The falafel sandwich, with perfectly crispy chickpea balls, is a remarkable value at $2.99.

Nabil Kudsi owns Babylon City Market with his wife, Auns Shalal. They moved from Baghdad to Sacramento as political refugees in 2008. At the time, there was no place to buy goods that reminded Kudsi of home.

“We missed the bread of course, and the kebab and these things,” he says. “We just missed the familiar, all around.”

Kudsi opened the market in 2011, bringing the familiar to his growing community. In 2012, there were more than 2,000 Iraqi refugees in Sacramento, according to a survey by the nonprofit Opening Doors. Kudsi estimates maybe half of his customers are from Iraq, with a hefty portion from Afghanistan and Iran as well.

At the market, those divisions don’t really matter. Everyone is there for the same delicious reasons: warm bread, hearty sandwiches and flame-kissed kebabs.