Hajar’s Shawarma King — Restaurant in City of Edinburgh

This was 5* till the shop changed management or workers a few months ago.

Used to be a regular with friends until, from my experience and in our opinion, portions, flavors, quality and consistency of food went downhill along some hygiene issues. To add salt to insult, they either forget to add my garlic sauce small sachet to my meal or sneakily started charging extra for it if I ask. Really?! Is that how you're hoping to get extra rich fast? By overcharging customers for what should have come included by default? Don't get me started on how the chicken is now almost always burned and the meat is very very chewy!

Card payments stopped because the machine is always down and so is the takeaway's online ordering system where you could get 10% off £30 orders, and has been down for many many weeks (while the more expensive deliveroo is fine - magic!). You can guess why "cash only" would be preferred!

Previous rating based on previous management: The best takeaway/shawerma place in Edinburgh and possibly Scotland -period. The bbq chicken is outstanding. Mix grill is consistently made and generous. The flavours are excellent. You will not be disappointed.

My only negatives are: -Too much oily fat in their shawerma wraps (perhaps for flavour?). -Some staff are very polite and courteous and the odd ones are not so much (especially when owner is not around). -and you'll find yourself overeating.

The first picture is a mix grill at £20 and the second was a diet chicken bbq at £8.50 with fattoush salad in the background. Happy to always order from them and give them although they're not...

I honestly have no idea how this place keeps getting so many 5 star reviews. Must be fake?? I used to love Shawarma King! The owners were absolutely lovely and the food might’ve been the most delicious shawarma I’ve ever had! Now the best word to describe it is disappointing. No, not strong enough… Disgusting! I have not tasted food that tastes this bad in a very long time. I had the bbq chicken and cous cous. Mind I used to adore the saffron bbq chicken from this place because it was so flavorful and juicy. Now the chicken arrives almost black and hard as a rock! The cous cous was a new level of insult. It was SO salty, it was inedible, which is pretty hard considering we love salt in our household! The side salad had what tasted like old fryer oil as dressing… I guess the tango orange was good at least hahaha

And to top this unbelievable drop in quality and flavour - the prices went way up! There is nothing wrong with a place matching the prices of competition and I am all for fair compensation, if the quality of food had stayed even close to what it used to be :(

Oh and to finish off my “lovely” evening, I got a pretty terrible acid reflux, which speaks volumes of the quality of produce in my opinion as I’ve only had acid reflux about 3...

AVOID AT ALL COST. Rude staff, especially the girl at the till. Lots of passive aggressiveness from her. We ordered 2 lamb warrnay rice and when we got home, we realized they gave us the wrong order. So we called up and they said it’s their mistake but can’t solve it. We offered to give the rice back in exchange for the ones we actually ordered and the girl on the phone said no, instead, and asked us to order £8 on justeat and they will give us 2 lamb rices, they just needed a driver to deliver to us. So I ordered a drink on justeat + delivery fee which was £8. And when the driver arrived, they gave us just lamb with no rice, nothing. Not the drivers fault at all because this is the company’s fault. We called up and asked why they lied to us and asked us to order just £8 worth on justeat and say they’ll give us our ORIGINAL order that we PAID for when they didn’t. The girl on the phone (who is the girl at the till, lookout for her btw) said she doesn’t know what happened and played dumb, even though she offer to give us back our original order. Bear in mind, they didn’t even give me the drink I ordered for on justeat. ABSOLUTE CHEAPSKATES. Girl at the till is a liar and has no integrity. Will never come back again, such a shame as we were...