Sababa has been open for business since 1987. Thanks to you, our loyal customers who have been coming and raising your kids on our food.

Sam Azar, owner, has been in the restaurant business for over 40 years.  He emigrated to Canada with his wife and two kids in 1975.  He opened his first restaurant in Toronto at Bathurst and Eglinton.  Here is where the Falafel became popular in Toronto (See Toronto Star Article).   Sam then opened two other restaurants before he opened his final dream project; a restaurant, grocery, and bakery all in one.

In April of 1987, Sababa officially opened with 40 seats and one employee. 19 years later Sababa seats 120 people, has a 4200 square foot grocery, a bakery that makes fresh pita everyday, and employs 27 full and part time employees. Sam’s success is attributed to his very hard work in the early years where he was at work at 7:00 a.m. and didn’t leave till 1:00 a.m. every day.

Middle east food has become quite popular in Toronto with over 300 middle east restaurants in the greater Toronto area. Sababa has won the Consumers Choice Award (conducted by Gallup Polls) for best Middle East Restaurant in Toronto for 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006. We have also won awards for best pita in Toronto and best Falafel in Toronto.

Sam has his four boys running the show now, but you will always find Sam at Sababa making sure everything runs smoothly.

The lands around the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, extending from Morocco to the Arabian Peninsula and Iran and sometimes beyond. The central part of this general area was formerly called the Near East, a name given to it by some of the first modern Western geographers and historians, who tended to divide the Orient into three regions. Near East applied to the region nearest Europe, extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf; Middle East, from the Gulf to Southeast Asia; and Far East, those regions facing the Pacific Ocean.

The change in usage began to evolve prior to World War II and tended to be confirmed during that war, when the term Middle East was given to the British military command in Egypt. Thus defined, the Middle East consisted of the states or territories of Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Palestine (now Israel), Jordan, Egypt, The Sudan, Libya, and the various states of Arabia proper (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, and the Trucial States, or Trucial Oman [now United Arab Emirates]. Subsequent events have tended, in loose usage, to enlarge the number of lands included in the definition. The three North African countries of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco are closely connected in sentiment and foreign policy with the Arab states. In addition, geographic factors often require statesmen and others to take account of Afghanistan and Pakistan in connection with the affairs of the Middle East.

Occasionally Greece is included in the compass of the Middle East because the Middle Eastern (then Near Eastern) question in its modern form first became apparent when the Greeks rose in rebellion to assert their independence of the Ottoman Empire in 1821. Turkey and Greece, together with the predominantly Arabic-speaking lands around the eastern end of the Mediterranean, were also formerly known as the Levant.

Use of the term Middle East, nonetheless, remains unsettled, and some agencies (notably the United States State Department and certain bodies of the United Nations) still employ the term Near East.