Königreich of Kebabs

There was a time in my life where a kebab served as a badge of honour, I’d somehow survived another night out. Despite the huge amounts of beer and numerous shots, I was still standing and had managed to stumble my way to one of a plethora of open-till-late kebab houses. It was very much “to the winner goes the spoils”. The menu was a blur, the price inconsequential, a kebab was the target, a participation medal earned, and that was good enough for me.

I spent three years as a student in the Welsh city of Cardiff, infamous for its “Chippy Alley”. Caroline Street, to use it’s given name, is the location for all manner of kebab houses and fast food joints that nightly serve happy and inebriated patrons with garlic or chili sauce drenched meat monstrosities from kicking out time until the sun slowly rises over the Norman keep of the city. Many fights have started here, many romances have blossomed and many a night has ended, washed in cheap beer and nondescript meat products.

If you are from the UK, your hometown no doubt has its very own version of Chippy Alley, a lovely place, full of conflict, love and disorderly conduct. Such microcosms are magnificent, wild and liberating. If you are not from the UK, odds are that you have no idea what you’re missing, which is to say the majesty of the traditional British night out.

Many, many years later, I now live in Germany, a place that has been my home for over a decade.  Wild and liberating are not adjectives I regularly require in order to describe the way in which I live my life today. I’ve aged, I’ve grown. I have a wife and cats and have spent the better part of the year in lockdown. What has also changed is that now I eat kebabs exclusively for lunch. Yes, that’s right, go back and read it again if you need to. Kebabs for lunch. There is no need for the drunken stupor, no need for blurry eyes, no need for bouncers on the door. Kebabs for lunch. It’s magnificent, let me tell you.

Here, a kebab, or rather Kebap, is a different beast from the one known to those who call the UK home. It has travelled less to establish itself and has not been bastardized in quite the way a UK kebab has. The UK has a proud history of taking a nations delicious food export and ruining it on a whim. Let’s not pretend we don’t all have family members who retain a certain nostalgia for pseudo-Indian curries with raisins in them.

Quality is the most obvious difference. Here in Germany, the standard anaemic pitta bread used in the UK is switched out for a toasted Fladenbrot (Flatbread), or a Dürüm (wrap) if you’re willing to pony up for the surcharge. Chili sauce is primarily crafted to taste good, as opposed to overwhelming or annihilating all taste receptors. The salad is an integral part of the contents and the meat is cast in good balance with it. Gone is the mound of moist meat garnished with a single slice of sad tomato, a ring of raw red onion and a leaf of limp lettuce. Germans acknowledge that salad is good for you and you’ll bloody well eat it. It’s with a lunchtime kebab that I’m able to appreciate how far I’ve come with my salad game. 19-year-old me would have ordered a kebab with nothing but sauce, now, like a real bloody adult, I embrace the diversity of mouth feel and the added nutrition that it grants me and my kebab. If that’s not personal development, I’m not sure what is. 

It’s totally normal here to see office workers, business owners and many other generally respectable people casually working their way through a kebab for lunch, their business attire shockingly void of specks of vomit or blood. If you have come across a someone in the UK eating a kebab whilst wearing a suit, it is almost certainly due to 1 of three situations:

1.       A liquid lunch got out of control.

2.       That merger worked has collapsed at the last minute.

3.       Their marriage is seriously on the rocks.  

In all cases, large quantities of alcohol will have been the major motivating factor.  

This reality of observing real, normal, sober people enjoying kebabs for lunch was, at first, jarring, no doubt about it, but it makes total sense. How is it possible that I was into my twenties when I first ate a kebab sober?

So, I say to the good people of the UK, petition your local councils, write your MP, rally your local small businesses and engage with your community. See the light, open yourself up to a new reality, a new possibility. Quality Kebabs. Kebabs for lunch. Kebabs sober. Kebabs we can remember. Kebabs.