Al Pastor Is a Lebanese Recipe With a Mexican Name

Puebla, Early 1900s

The vertical spit did not start in Mexico. It arrived with Lebanese immigrants who settled in Puebla in the early 1900s, many of them leaving during the Ottoman Empire's conscription, and brought the shawarma spit with them as part of that migration. Nobody in Puebla at the time was setting out to invent a new Mexican dish, they were bringing a cooking method they already knew, meat stacked on a vertical spit and shaved off in thin slices as it cooked. That single piece of equipment, the trompo, is the entire root of a dish now treated as one of Mexico's most iconic street foods. The spit was not adapted from a Mexican technique, it was imported whole, then reshaped by whatever ingredients the new location actually had on hand.

Lamb Becomes Pork, Pita Becomes Tortilla

Once the spit was in Puebla, local cooks adapted it to what they had available. Lamb, the traditional shawarma meat, became pork. Pita, the traditional bread, became the corn tortilla. The resulting dish got its own name during that transition: tacos árabes, Arab tacos, a name that still openly credits where the technique came from. Every piece of the dish changed except the one thing that mattered most, the vertical spit itself and the method of shaving cooked meat directly off it to order. That is the part that survived the translation from one cuisine's ingredients to another's, and it is the part that makes the dish recognizable as the same idea even after everything else around it changed. Nothing about the tortilla or the pork was the original recipe, only the spit was.

Mexico City, 1960s: A New Name

The dish kept moving. By the 1960s, the same spit and the same shaving method had reached Mexico City and picked up the name most people know today, al pastor, shepherd style, understood as a nod to the Lebanese cooks who first turned the spit, carried forward even as the dish became fully associated with Mexican street food. Two name changes, tacos árabes to al pastor, mark two different moments in the same technique's migration, first from Lebanon to Puebla, then from Puebla to Mexico City, with the spit itself the one constant running through both stops. Most people today would call al pastor a purely Mexican dish, and in the sense that Mexico City is where it picked up the name everyone now uses, that is fair enough. But the technique underneath that name, the spit itself, made its first stop somewhere else entirely.

Pork's Three Educations

Pork gets three completely different educations depending on which side of this book's kitchen you are standing in. Dwaeji-bulgogi is thin-sliced pork, marinated hard in gochujang, gochugaru, and pear, then grilled fast and hot. Al pastor is dried chiles and achiote, stacked on that same vertical spit the Lebanese immigrants brought to Puebla in the early 1900s. Carnitas is nothing but pork, lard, and salt, simmered low for hours in Michoacán. Three techniques, three timelines, three completely different relationships between the same base ingredient and heat. None of them is a variation on the others, they are three separate traditions that happen to share a starting point in the same animal. Each one treats pork as if it were the only meat in the world, which is exactly why setting the three side by side makes the distance between Seoul, Puebla, and Michoacán so visible.

The Spit Logic in a Third Country

Once you understand the spit as a technique rather than a Mexican invention, you can put it anywhere. The book's Korean BBQ Chicken al Pastor takes that same spit logic, meat stacked and shaved to order, and runs it through gochujang instead of the achiote and dried chiles of the original Puebla adaptation. It is the same idea landing in a third country, the technique staying constant while the seasoning changes to match wherever it lands next. That is the throughline across all three stops, Lebanon, Puebla, and now this book's kitchen, the spit travels, the flavor adapts, and nothing about the equipment itself needs to change for that to keep happening again in a fourth kitchen.

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Korean BBQ Chicken al Pastor is in Seoul Meets Mexico City.