Toum has made a home out of Detroit. At the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern restaurants sprawled throughout the city, you’ll find this starkly white condiment on just about every table. And though toum unites Levant cuisine, it also welds together some of Detroit’s greatest Arabic restaurants.
For the uninitiated, toum is a powerful condiment made simply from garlic, oil, salt, and lemon. Its flavor is biting; its texture is elegant, fluffy, and creamy. But as with all cherished foods that span numerous cultures, everyone has different ideas about how to make the stuff. Some recipes call for potatoes, some yogurt, and some people even blend in egg whites. At its core, however, the condiment is inherently simple — a bright, fatty, redolent accompaniment scratched together with few ingredients.
In Detroit, toum is as nuanced as it is vast; just about every restaurant seems to serve a different iteration of it.
At Phoenicia in Birmingham, the toum is called garlic whip, and it’s an apt title — the restaurant’s garlic sauce is exceptionally light and features stiff peaks almost like whipped egg whites (though you won’t find egg whites in its recipe). Its flavor is both delicate and bold, and it proves to be one of the most luscious condiments one can order. The garlic whip at Phoenicia enhances anything you apply it to — stuffed grape leaves, kebabs, a burger — and it even makes an excellent condiment for the thick-cut french fries.
Phoenicia’s toum is so good that Brett Anderson, writer for The New York Times, consulted owner Sameer Eid, also known as Samy, about Phoenicia’s recipe and featured it on the NYT website.
And although toum is typically seen as a staple in Lebanese culture, it’s also common to find this pungent garlic sauce in Syrian, Greek, and Yemeni households — basically anywhere there’s pita, grape leaves, and lamb. Over in Dearborn, at Cedarland, the toum is smooth, creamy, and pronounced — the perfect accompaniment to the restaurant’s beef kebab and chicken shawarma and as comforting as its complimentary bowl of lentil soup.
Bucharest Grill, where the shawarma is cheap, filling, and never lacking flavor, remains a lighthouse for the hungry and continues to be one of the most celebrated chain restaurants in the area. Its toum is standard but consistent and adequately cuts through its starchy, french fry-laden Bucharest chicken shawarma.
In Midtown, the toum at La Palma — the home of my favorite bread service in the city — is free with every meal. The small, puffy shells of pita that accompany the toum are warm, chewy, and pocketed, perfect for dipping or stuffing with the tender beef gallayah. The toum itself is rather gelatinous but packs a robust garlic flavor that’s met with a delicious lemony tang on the back end.
However, toum isn’t always good. Because Detroit provides so many great iterations of garlic sauce, I have also begun to develop a discerning taste for it. As such, I have found other versions of this ancient garlic spread to be made sloppily. It can often be too oily or too harsh. Other times, it reads tame and insipid. As Samy Eid of Phoenicia will tell you, making toum is a delicate process, and it’s hard to get right.
Take the time to understand the nuances of toum, and you’ll begin to understand the refinement of Detroit’s dining scene, which continues to march on mightily.
This story originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our digital edition will be available on April 7.
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