The Rotisserie Keeps Turning

May 6, 2026 (Revision Date)

The Rotisserie Keeps Turning

The outside wall of Muncheez is painted turquoise. It is not the tasteful sage or muted beige of the wealthy boutique hotels and streets lining Wisconsin. “SHWARMA” is painted in large burnt-orange near the base. It is not a normal English word. Above the window, in hand-lettered script is a quote from Khalil Gibran: Friendship is always a sweet responsibility – never an opportunity. The paint is beginning to crack along the mortar lines. Nobody seems to have noticed, or maybe no one bothered to care.

Muncheez does not belong here aesthetically and it does not seem to care.

Noon

I arrive before the lunch rush of white, well-dressed corporate employees on a clear afternoon in late February. The floor is terracotta and white hexagonal tile. The ceiling is burnt orange. Three-self ordering kiosks are mounted to a terrazzo counter as soon as I walk in. Their screens glow a bright yellow advertisement: “DOWNLOAD OUR APP. Scan the QR Code.” A surveillance camera is mounted directly above them. Above the pickup area, a sign hangs from the ceiling. It reads: PICK ME UP! On the kiosk screen, after you tap to start your order, the first thing the system asks for is your phone number.

Figure 1: the QR digital kiosks present as soon as you enter the Muncheez establishment. It is meant to establish a “digital connection” before any human interaction, mainly for ease of ordering convenience.

Figure 2: “PICK ME UP!” labeled on the far end of the Muncheez kitchen counter. Names for the order are also not announced. Once you order on the kiosk, you are expected to sift through different orders under the “PICK ME UP!” sign to ensure you receive the right one.

Along the right wall runs a narrow wooden ledge bolted to white subway tile at counter height. Below it is a row of dark metal stools, each facing the wall. There is nothing for the wall to look at. If a stranger was lucky, they would have enough room to put their food on the wooden ledge.

Nobody seems to pay attention to one another during lunch hour. In 45 minutes, 12 people come and go, not a single person ordering with any of the employees. Four stay to eat, facing the white tile wall in silence. The man with AirPods ordering at the kiosk does not even acknowledge the employee. The woman picking up her app order does not even acknowledge the employee. The kiosk screen cycles back and forth from ordering screens to its ugly, yellow advertisement designed to capture data in the guise of convenience.

At the far end of the kitchen, past the flat-top griddle and tall glass counter, two vertical rotisseries hold their ground. The one on the left is pale gold - layers of chicken. The one on the right is darker, lamb charred at its edges, fat rendering slowly under heat coils.

A wood stone sits next to the vertical rotisserie with its mouth open and glowing amber visible. The chimney above it is a massive rough clay tube rising through the burnt-orange ceiling.

It seems almost out of place. Something from a different century dropped into the middle of a digital ecosystem.

Night

I return on March 10th at around 8 PM. The staff has dropped from three to two. The volume has more than doubled. A DoorDash tablet is propped alongside the kiosks with its screen showing a queue of incoming orders. The same man in the black cap labeled Muncheez with the “z” missing moves between streams simultaneously. The in-person orders, delivery queues, and cleaning duties. He moves seamlessly between the rotisserie and packaging station without ever fully stopping or conversing with anyone. He pulls hunks of meat from the chicken cone with a long knife, one practiced downward motion. He wraps. He labels. He moves. He gets his shit done.

DoorDash drivers pick up and cycle in every few minutes. One checks the name on the bag, picks it up, and is gone before the door fully closes. Everyone is there for a specific purpose: the exchange between the driver and staff is entirely nonverbal. In a room where the staff speaks Spanish to each other and the drivers speak their own language, the kiosks and digital interfaces have already handled everything that language would have needed to do. The friction of human miscommunication is entirely designed out.

A Moment for Culture

Lebanese Flag: Dozens of bullet holes, clustering around the cedar, scattered across the stripes.

Another illustration that appears on the back wall is a black-and-white illustration of Beirut. It is known as the city rendered as a dense spiral, buildings and minarets compressed into concentric rings. It is viewed from above as if someone mapped it by memory. At the bottom, in Arabic calligraphy: بيروت.

After Iftar

March 14th, 11 PM, a Saturday. I bring my friend, who is half Senegalese and half Dominican.

It is Ramadan.

Three groups come in within twenty minutes of each other, periodically mixing with the various drunk college-aged kids and puppy-love-stricken couples.

Three groups come in within twenty minutes of each other — four people, then three, then six.

The men wear prayer caps; and the women wear hijabs.

The groups move through the kiosk ordering without hesitation.

Nobody questions if the meat is halal.

They take the corner seating, pulling tables together.

Three separate groups become one continuous gathering.

Someone distributes food from a bag across the table while laughter spreads around the corner and into the main room.

The Arabic conversation moves fast and warm and overlapping. They stay past midnight.

My friend leans in: iftar. They just finished praying.

What the Flag Says

A man walks in at 11:30 pm with a crying baby in one arm and a leather laptop bag in the other. He comes and sits down at the table next to us, apologizing twice before doing so. When his baby drops something, he apologizes again and hurries to pick it up. My friend and I help pick it up and learn that the man is 36, coincidentally also from Senegal, and pursuing his master’s at GW. He says the food is cheap and close enough to home, where both his wife and the baby’s older brother are.

My friend and I noticed how he orders at the kiosk with the baby balanced on one hip, navigating the screen one-handed. He finds a corner of the wooden ledge and sets the laptop bag down once again. He then balances the food container on his knee once it arrives. He got a chicken shawarma sandwich, some grape leaves, and a falafel wrap.. He told us the grape leaves were for tomorrow’s lunch, and the falafel wrap were for tomorrow’s dinner.

At some point the Arabic from the Ramadan table rises and he glances over. He eats quickly, with the efficiency of someone moving between obligations. Before midnight, he is gone.

The rotisseries never stop turning when the kiosks go dark. The wood stone oven does not cool between the lunch rush and Ramadan gathering. The fat keeps rendering. The stone keeps holding heat. Chaos moves through every version of this space regardless of who is in it and what cultures it inhabits throughout the day.

For the man from Senegal, the food tastes like home. For the Ramadan groups, this is where they came after prayer, without having to explain why. For the workers who gleamed a huge smile when I spoke to them in Spanish and asked where they were from, this is where they can make a decent living.

The space holds all of it at once, without ever requiring anyone to acknowledge the others.

My friend nods slowly. Later, walking back up Wisconsin, he says: when you grow up between cultures, you stop caring whether a space is authentic in the way critics mean it. You just want to know if the food tastes right.