S.D. Mediterranean restaurant named one of best in the country by USA Today
Originally published in the USA Today.
At Sanaa’s Gourmet Mediterranean in Sioux Falls, S.D., clean cuisine is not meant to make you feel full, it’s meant to make you feel well.
Owner Sanaa Abourezk has intrigued the Midwest for years and has received national attention on “Beat Bobby Flay,” in Food Network Magazine and in the New York Times, but according to USA TODAY’s 2025 Restaurants of the Year list, today her restaurant is one of the top 44 places to eat in America.
“This is so nice, I’m so flattered,” said Abourezk, a two-time James Beard Award nominee. “You have to understand, I had never opened a business before, and I’m a woman selling food no one has heard of before, but I opened this place so people can know what fresh food really is.”
More:What's the best restaurant near you? Check out USA TODAY's 2025 Restaurants of the Year.
More:Inside look at how USA TODAY chose its Restaurants of the Year for 2025
What makes Sanaa's stand out
The odds were against her. Abourezk was a Syrian-born agricultural engineer with a master’s degree in nutrition who wanted to serve soy beans and tofu in a state that needs red meat on every menu.
“People would come in and say, ‘So what do you have here that I can eat?’” Abourezk said. “‘Do you have a burger? Do you have a hot dog? Where are the French fries?’”
She’d kindly offer kufta instead, a Turkish meatball in tomato sauce that probably a Midwestern carnivore could appreciate, and they’d come back the next day.
“I just wouldn’t compromise,” Abourezk said. She was told to change her menu, to change her hours, to serve drinks or to go someplace else, but her snug and neighborly lunch spot stays anyway, with its savory spices, chopped veggies every morning, pitas in the oven and music in the kitchen, just as she intended more than 20 years ago.
Abourezk is like a gentle mother to the Sioux Falls community, quietly putting a bowl of chickpea soup in front of us when we didn’t even realize we were hungry for it. On her social media, she teaches us how to make an “easy breezy” sumac-spiced arugula sandwich and how to “cookercize” for our bodies and souls.
“I just want you to enjoy healthy food and teach you how to cook well,” Abourezk said.
And don’t think healthy food cannot be sweet. There’s baklava and lady fingers in the pastry case, but it’s Abourezk herself who is the cherry on top. If you catch her on Instagram or even in the restaurant’s kitchen, her hip is poppin’ to 50 Cent and the bells on her skirt are jingling. Did you just spot an okra necklace on her?
Why, yes you did.
At Sanaa’s Gourmet Mediterranean — the one amid all the steakhouses — there is a pep in everyone’s step and an aroma you want to take in the way you inhale atop a mountain. It makes your body feel good.
What to order at Sanaa’s
Tabbouli: This one’s Abourezk’s favorite dish; she has it for lunch every day. The crisp salad is finely chopped parsley — she goes through 400 bunches of parsley a week — mixed with bulgar wheat, tomatoes, onions, olive oil and lemon juice dressing.
Fatayer: “Say it like flat tire,” Abourezk said. And enjoy it however you like. Choose from eggplant or potato, cheese or mushroom shawarma, beef or chicken (16 options in all) for this Mediterranean calzone. It’s made with homemade pita bread dough, baked in a stone oven — “We don’t fry anything, period!” — and served with a side of basmati rice pilaf and yogurt cucumber sauce.
Shish tawook: And this one’s for the first-timers. Tender shredded chicken is cooked slowly in red sauce with cumin, garlic and sesame seed paste and served with basmati rice. It’s a safe, delicious dish, one that always makes the skeptics go, “I didn’t know healthy food tasted so good!”
Did you know?
Abourezk was married to Jim Abourezk, the first Arab to serve in the United States Senate, and also her reason for becoming a chef. “Oh, Jim was a lousy cook,” Sanaa said. So when they first met, she took his pan of boiled beans off the stovetop and instead made for him healthy, delicious meals for the next 40 years. He died in February of 2023.
“People used to approach him and say, ‘Ah! Are you Senator Abourezk?’ ” Sanaa said. “And he’d say, ‘Well, I used to be. Now, I’m Sanaa’s husband.’ ”
