It came as no surprise that the furious horse meat scandal should sooner
or later engulf the humble kebab shop. Long the butt of jokes
about the quality and identity of their meat, it turns out that some may have
received 100% horse meat - labelled as beef or lamb - from a UK slaughterhouse
and meat factory. Nevertheless, I remain a staunch defender of the king of the
high street takeaways. Horse meat is far from the worst ingredient to be found
in take away food.
My favourite kebab house,
'The Bella Doner’ is only two minutes stagger from the tube, but it is on a
side-street, and food snobs and vegetarians never seem to find their way there,
even on Saturday nights.
Its customers, though fairly eclectic, are mostly 'regulars' who indulge
in the same savoury treat every visit and go there for the quality as much as
the convenience.
If you are asked why you favour a particular kebab house, it is often
the shish that is mentioned first, but the thing that most appears to me about
'The Bella Doner’ is that giant spit of dripping roasted meat itself, or what
people often call the 'elephants foot’, amongst other less charitable names.
The whole architecture and fittings of this kebab house are
uncompromisingly practical. It has no grained woodwork, ornamental mirrors,
subdued lighting or sham Michelin-ia. On the contrary, it has glass fronted
counters, formica tables, plastic panels and other modern simplicities. The stained floors, the chipped
chiller-cabinets, the neon fly-electrocutor, the peeling ceiling stained dark
yellow by griddle-smoke, the stuffed pickle jar on the fridge. Everything has
the transient functionality of the late twentieth century.
In winter there is generally a fierce heat coming from at least two of
the grills, and the corner shop lay-out of the place means you don’t have to
queue outside should there be other customers. On the illuminated price list
there are doner kebabs, shish kebabs, shami kebab, burgers, deep-fried chicken,
‘extras’ and humus for those too bashful to risk eating kebab meat in public.
There may be a video game machine tucked away in the corner, but it is on
low volume so doesn’t disturb the general ambience of the place.
In 'The Bella Doner ' it is usually quiet enough for conversation, but
no more than pleasant small talk. Instead, you watch the telly in the corner
showing an obscure game-show. Even on late nights and such occasions the
chatting that happens is of a decorous kind.
The shop proprietors don’t know any of their customers by name, and try
not to take a personal interest in anyone. They are all middle-aged men. Two of
them have three days facial hair growth and builders clefts big enough to park
a bike in. They call everyone 'mate', irrespective of age and avoid eye
contact. ('Mate,' not 'Matey': kebab shops where the server calls you 'Matey'
always have a dodgy raffish atmosphere.)
Unlike most kebab houses, 'The Bella Doner' sells kutluma, pakora and
samosa as well as chips, and it also sells condoms, ‘morning after pills’, and
is obliging about using the loo in an emergency.
You cannot get beer at ‘The Bella Doner', but there is always the
glass-fronted fridge where you can
get coke, lucozade and even kefir (a speciality of the house), as well as tea,
hot chocolate and that bitter, weak coffee that only seems to exist in
take-aways.
The special pleasure of their doner kebab is that you can have home made
chili sauce with it. I doubt whether as many as ten per cent of London kebab
houses make their own sauce these days, but 'The Bella Doner' is one of them.
It is a sharp, piquant, firey sort of sauce and goes perfectly with the meat.
They are particular about how the kebabs are served at 'The Bella Doner'
and never, for example, make the mistake of serving them in a polystyrene tray.
The modern trend is for a deconstructed kebab with pitta, meat, salad and sauce
piled on top of each other in a closed polystyrene tray and then suffocated in
a plastic bag. But in my opinion a kebab tastes better out of a paper wrapping.
Apart from the usual pitta bread, ‘The Bella Doner’ also serves some of those
pleasant doner wraps rolled in flatbreads.
The great surprise of 'The Bella Doner’ is its restaurant. You go
through a narrow passage leading out of the take-away, and find yourself in a
fairly large room of plastic tables and chairs with framed pictures of Turkish landmarks
hanging on the walls.
Here, you can get table service, for example, mixed kebab, or chicken
kebab with shredded salad and chips served on real crockery and eaten with a
knife and fork for about a six quid.
On late evenings there are no drunken rowdies. You can sit in the restaurant
or at the little metal tables out the front of the shop and tuck into your
kebab feast without being disturbed by loutish behaviour and foul language.
Many as are the virtues of 'The Bella Doner’ I think that the restaurant
is its best feature, because it encourages a cross section of society to go
there, instead of being the preserve of late night junk food drunks.
And though this is regulated and processed food, some horse meat
inevitably sneaks into the doner mix. This, I believe, is against the law, but
it is a law that deserves to be broken, for it is the puritanical nonsense of
excluding this perfectly reasonable and nutritious flesh that has to some
extent, reduced the quality of the doner and therefore its reputation.
'The Bella Doner’ is my ideal of what a kebab shop should be at any
rate, in the London area. (The qualities one expects of a regional emporium are
slightly different.)
But now is the time to reveal something which the discerning and
disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already. There is no such place
as 'The Bella Doner'.
That is to say, there may well be a kebab house of that name, but I
don't know of it, nor do I know any house with just that combination of
qualities.
I know kebab houses where the shish is good but you can't sit down,
others where the chicken kebab is to die for but which are dripping with noisy
and unruly crowds, and others which are quiet but the doner is generally greasy.
As for restaurants, offhand I can only think of a dozen London kebab shops that
possess them.
But, to be fair, I do know of a few places that almost come up to 'The Bella
Doner’. I have mentioned above qualities that the perfect kebab house should
have, and I know of one that has eight of them. Even there, however, the chili
sauce is bland and the restaurant is not open in the evenings.
And if anyone knows of a kebab house that has a wide range of juicy
kebabs, home made chili sauce, take-aways served in paper wrappers, a
restaurant and eclectic clientele, I should be glad to hear of it, even though
its name were something as prosaic as 'Kebab Machine’, or ‘McDonners’.
In
homage (and with huge apologies) to the memory of the great George Orwell, born
110 years ago this June. His outstanding essay about the perfect pub 'The Moon Under Water' was published in the Evening Standard in 1946.
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