Britain: KebabShops
Carnage in the streets
Britain is a country and an island, made up of other countries, based on and built on booze. It is the true engine of the economy and has been since time began there.
I imagine when the Vikings showed up, quite proud of their immense drinking abilities, were taken aback and possibly disgusted by the reckless abandon and utter base of life that booze is in Britain, and decided to sack the place to calm things down a bit.
Olaf Redbeard would have been combing the streets of Peterborough, Hackney or Leicester, and seeing that it was a bit before midnight and the true carnage was spilling out on to the streets. Citizens young, old, man, woman and other would be stumbling about, sometimes without shoes for no explicable reason, looking for something to close the night. Some may find some cocaine to keep the dream alive for a couple of more hours whilst others might have the smell of kebab enter their brains. This would happen when they move from that doom bell of last orders, to that last horrible gulp of warm lager, to the welcoming grease-laden wafts surrounding the streets around those bars.
Some cultures find the English saying “eating is cheating” to be positively disturbing. It is ironic that Turkish culture, probably the originator of kebab is one of them. The fact that drinking is not only not to be done under slow and pleasurable circumstances, but that it is a contest, a race to win, is unfathomable for many on farther shores. What they don’t understand of course is this is how Britain works.
The pub exists because you don’t have enough room to relax in your own damn house, so the “public house” (AKA “pub”) acts as an extension. Binge drinking is how community is fostered in that communal living room. As an engine of commerce, drinking is the pride, the equaliser, the thing to make you forget why you can’t just relax in your own house or why you have to drink so damn much to forget the day.
Officially a pub can, assuming they’ve paid for the proper license, stay open basically as late as they want, but they don’t. This is because for probably almost a century they shut at 23:00. A bell rings, you scrape together the last of the money and buy as many pints as you can, which you then have to neck1 as quickly as possible before the staff start yelling at you. But you haven’t eaten any dinner because well, to get in a night before midnight you have to start early. And because the pub is your living room, well when you want to finish work and relax, you go straight away to unwind. After its all done, you’re hungry, and chances are you don’t have a lot of time or money.
Kebab as time-space
Kebab is meat abstracted. It is dead animal at the apex of efficiency. The meat is now in a tube-cone to be easily transported, stored and carved with ruthless logicality. I’ve seen it made actually, it’s not that gross or whatever and probably a lot less so than sausage. It means not just food in Britian, it means night and it means very drunk. It is beyond sustenance and now a state of being.
However, in other places, like in Central Europe or actually Turkey, you can very easily and without any consternation, eat a kebab in the middle of the day. In Britain, when spoken, it’s often preceded by the words, “naughty” or “dirty.” The act, the thought of it really, is filled with potential shame. But a nudge, nudge, wink, wink shame, as in the one who should be shamed doesn’t quite feel like taking it on their persons, is desperate or finally and likely the case, drunk off their tits as they say. It needs to be consumers in the dark and drunk. This is what typifies it to Britain.
How the kebab shop became the de facto post drinking experience should be the subject of a PhD thesis at some point, but my guess is that there were a bunch of crafty Turks who saw that there was a ton of drunks who’s only option after all of that was maybe a hot dog. The market was wide open for diversification and exploitation. They spread themselves to every corner of every bar zone and hamlet, providing the protein that your brain thinks will help. They provide that care for the stomach that hates you as it congeals against your intestines walls, hoping to salve the night of spite, disappointment and bad decision making, itself an engine of regret come to pass.
What follows is my tribute and investigation into London’s top kebab shops based on their names.
Diamond Kebab (Finsbury Park)
There are many things that kebab is or should be in your mind and in your gut late Saturday night. One thing for sure it shouldn’t be is crystalline. However, the impetus is clear. This kebab is winning on levels that can only align themselves with something like a diamond. It isn’t top shelf, it is glass case. It is armed guards. It is given once in a generation to some and frivolously by the well heeled. It is aspiration and comes with yoghurt sauce if you want it.
Kebab Zero (Shoreditch)
I’ve passed Kebab Zero close to a million times in my time living in London. Even without the brand refresh in 2017, I’ve brought it up to just about anyone and everyone I talked to to explore the semantics and teleological ramifications of the name.
A number of years ago I was doing what people in Britain do on a Friday, which is be extremely drunk and try to talk to the people making your kebab like they give a shit. I’ve done this a lot. Way too much in fact. I feel as though my marriage to a Turk gives me license to try and bridge that glass divide of shredded iceberg lettuce and what is supposed to be yoghurt sauce. It never goes well, despite my pidgin Turkish. If there’s one thing I’ve found out is that the guy who names the place is not the one cutting lamb extrusion at one in the morning.
But that is just the issue with this particular establishment because of the name. If I was selling a food, lets say a base commodity that just had to work and not do much besides that I might try to make it sound quite functional. I would give the consumer, via my brand, the feeling they could depend on it. It was not expensive, but it was dependable. It was a fair and equitable purchase and had value for a fair price. This is not the case when you’re equating your product with nothing. Here is your slop for £6.50 and do you want chilli sauce?
This review by Katy I. on Yelp best explores the tension between nothingness and utility better than I could.
Obviously this place is best avoided for health reasons, but so are tequila shots, cigarettes and class A drugs. It doesn’t stop everyone from doing them and then crying about it afterwards. If you want a dirty kebab, man up and deal with the consequences, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and based on this I believe that Kebab Zero are providing a very necessary public service.
Yes, your experience is zero. You’ve gained nothing. Perhaps they’ve thought it through much further than I or anyone else has, exploring the conceit that yes, you are indeed zero, and so are we. We produce nothing and you are consuming nothing and all of this, your life, your mortgage, that coworker you had to suffer conversation with for two hours while meters from your office; all of it means nothing. You have indeed tried to drink your way to victory through to oblivion, but what you’re in fact getting is erasure. You are zero and this kebab, our kebab, is the vehicle for this oblivion.
Rainbow Kebab (now likely closed but I want to say was somewhere around Finsbury Park)
I have a scene playing in my head when I think about this one. It goes like this:
Mehmet Etoglu immigrates to the UK in 1982 on a visa from the Ankara Agreement of 1963 proudly on the basis of him being a businessman. He quickly sets up shop in the lager and ale fallout zone, hoping to scoop up the detritus of closing time expulsions and provide to them what he hopes is a tiny fragment of beauty in their sordid, ugly, drunken lives. After his cousin Tamer asks him what sort of sign he wants, he thinks back to his childhood on the Black Sea coast. There the heavy mists would rise into the highlands of the Pontic Alps. Often times in late April the clouds would roll off the sea and break, creating the most beautiful rainbows. This he would give his customers as they dragged their cold, wet, grey and drunk bodies to him for sustenance.
I’m sure it took him ages to realise that rainbows in most western countries means something else. Or maybe not. Or maybe he doesn’t care either way because he still loves rainbows and so should you. Regardless, we salute his kebab, his brand bravery and dedication to diversity.
Kebab is you, kebab is me, kebab is everything
The Place Imploder series looks at how design, or more broadly material culture, and place collide, intersect and just get down and dirty with each other. Kebab is a technology, that much is clear. It is a food delivery mechanism for our age more than any other. Many consider whether kebab is modernist or post-modernist. I would posit it is neither. It is beyond recursive lack of meaning and post-rationality and if anything proto-post-modernist. It shows us a hope in containment and order. It shows us the way to a stripped down efficiency van der Rohe could only hope for whilst harkening to the rawness and trail of bad decisions that lead beyond rationale.
Now, go and get a kebab. It doesn’t matter what time of day it is, we’ve already covered all of that. If you’re currently in the UK, you might have to knock a few back first to let is ease into you better, but we’re all fine with that.
- One of my favourite British English words, to drink fast. I imagine it comes from either it going quick down the middle of your neck or one having to quickly crank their neck back to get a pint down as quickly as possible. ↩︎