Connoisseurship and criticism in the art of The Kebab.

At the end of next week, I'll be moving to Seoul, South Korea where I will undoubtedly continue to write these blogs, updating you with food experiences from the New World. However, what I have for you this evening is an account of the most incredible, sumptuous, delicately fragrant food from the oldest of worlds, biblical in its simplicity but simply complete and excitingly earthy.
Down a back alley off Stoke Newington High Street in London, lies a veritable mecca for fans of Turkish cuisine. Mangal Ocakbasi is an unassuming bring-your-own-booze kebab grill house, which I have absolutely no problem calling my favourite restaurant. In the world. Ever.
The reasons for this are manifold but range from the outstanding quality of the kebabs on offer, to the freshly baked flat bread to the most incredible, smokey Şakşuka, a starter of oily aubergine, tomatoes and onions.
One of the best things about the place though (other than the outrageously cheap prices) is the sense of old-world theatre surrounding it.
This feeling of authentic Trojan drama starts as soon as you walk through the front entrance. As you open the door, an enormous convection chimney sucks the outside air into the room, flinging you into a wall of smoke, primary colours and amazing smells. Once you're sucked safely inside, you walk past the grill and get a view of the enormous kebabs and skewers on offer and sit yourself down with meat on the mind.
On the menu are thirteen different kebabs, mostly chicken or lamb and you can choose minced or cubed meat. As well as the kebabs, there are yoghurt dishes, where the meat from the kebabs is mixed with yoghurt to make a sort of meaty, yoghurty dry stew/curry.
Typically, I visit Mangal with a good friend of mine, Jim Cotton, who actually introduced me to the place and typically, we order the mixed meze (hummus, aubergine, yoghurt and tomato and onion, always great) followed by lamb shish and the chicken Tavukbeyti. I get the impression though, that anything you order here would be absolutely as if Ataturk himself had grilled it on a middling Autumn evening somewhere on the great sweep of the Bosphorous.
The meat is of the best quality and the lamb shish perfectly cooked; smokey and charcoaly on the outside and erotically innard-pink in the middle, where the meat has been kissing the skewer. The Tavukbeyti, or minced chicken with parsley lemon and garlic is the real star of the show though. Perfectly weighted with salt and lemon and garlic and all of the fresh, base flavours of humanity that are so instantly and primally satisfying; those flavours that release an intense injection of narcotic satisfaction into the brain. This is food that humans have been eating since the dawn of time, unsullied and unadulterated by the spice trade or any twist of modernity. It is humble, yet creamy, luxurious yet composed of natural, good things, ruffage and vegetation, caveman meat cooked over an open fire, ingredients that would have been gathered and hunted by our forebears in Byzantine lands.
After the carnage, comes some sweet relief and although we were more then satisfied by the meats and meze, we ordered baclava which was rich with oily honey but also crunchy and meaty with nuts; an excellent end to a fine repast.
So, if you're ever in Dalston or round Stoke Newington way- fascinating areas in a modern city, one which is changing increasingly rapidly- make the trek to this outstanding place and dodging new wave idiots wearing vintage pants on fixed-wheel bikes, drop in for a taste of something that probably hasn't changed much in thousands of years and hopefully won't for millenia to come.

What's the worst/strangest thing you've ever found in your food?

Long dormant but still champing at the bit, ready to make mouths water by invoking the myriad and complex flavours of the New World, I'm back and haven't you just missed me?
Moving away from the traditional Pastry Disgrace formula of reviewing restaurants and what they do best, I find it can be equally fun to look under the grubby sofa of the food industry.
So, to fill you in on my absence, I've been working at a summer school, where the food wasn't quite inedible but did disappoint with its monotony and low quality ingredients, often unfortunate traits of large-scale catering on a budget. Saying this, when you're hungry, you eat, right? That's right.
The school had a couple of hot options every day and even had a healthy salad bar available every lunch and dinner time. The bar contained an assortment of greenery, tomatoes, cold meats, and leftovers processed into the likes of potato salad and I think it's safe to say that everyone took advantage of it, if only to break up the monotony of the school-dinner like hot options (lumpy custard-check, weird jelly desserts-check, bad gravy-check). That was, until weird things started showing up in the salad leaves...
The strangest apparition was one lunch time amongst the lettuce when what appeared to be tree leaf, brown, curled, dead and full of gritty mud sat winking at me from amongst the rocket. Thankfully, it didn't go in my mouth but it did remind of some other awful experiences with foreign objects in food that just shouldn't have been there.
One of my favourite stories comes from my brother who swears blind thathe found a whole cow's eyelid, replete with eyelashes, lurking under the pastry of a "Fray Bentos" pie!. Another friend of mind once found a pig's tooth in her Chinese meal. So in that spirit, this week's blog asks: What's the worst thing you've ever found in your food?

Ubiquitous Chinese flan

I happen to think that if you’re not British, you probably wont understand what I’m driving at here, but if on the off chance you’re sitting reading this in an office or staffroom somewhere in equatorial Africa, I urge you to persevere anyway, because the story I'm about to tell you is nothing short of captivating. There is a special kind of grey, produced by the most solemn of British winter days, the kind of day on which as a child one's options for Sunday afternoon entertainment are severely limited. This grey pervades every element of the human being. It leaks into your cavities like a cartoon smell. Living in Spain, I occasionally think back to this soupy grimness with an silent chuckle, knowing that I'll never have to experience it again if I so choose. I also happen to think that this heavy, lumpen, indecisive grey helps form a large part of the British character. We can be heavy, grey, indecisive, ugly and cold. So can bad Chinese food. I know, I’ve eaten it. I’m sure you have too, but I want to tell you a story and its about me ok? Me,me,me.

I don’t know what it was about the other diners in the Hang Zhou Chinese restaurant near Seville's cathedral, but they immediately made me think of 70's television commercial extras. There was a man in a retro towel polo shirt. He had a moustache and he was wearing very short white shorts, as if he'd just finished a squash game. He was also very earnest, judging by how frequently he bent his head over his food to nod vigorously at his companion. My view of his face was distorted by falling fish shit and rotting food in the dirty water of a 'tropical' fish tank to my left.

He made think of the sort of man who might live in Welwyn-Garden City. I don't know what that is, but it has always sounded extremely mysterious to me, full of soft men in Alan Partridge sports gear. Oh and he had a Thai or Vietnamese wife which somehow completed the picture. She had a perm and looked like the bass player from Status Quo circa 1978. Slightly sinister, slightly sordid. When I saw him, and I came to learn how bad this restaurant is, I had the fleeting thought that he might be a hired diner, booked to create atmosphere and lure passing punters in. Of course, the level of depravity you would need to possess in order to hire this man to advertise your restaurant, neatly coincides with the level of pure, twisted sickness needed to produce such vile food. It made sense.

Never has the maxim 'you get what you pay for' been better applied than to this 'restaurant'. I visited this place at the end of a long month and as with all long months, the financial situation was ropey. When I saw a 6 Euro, three course Chinese meal advertised as I walked past, I jumped at the chance, surely knowing, deep down how upsetting the experience would be. Anyway, hope pushed me through the door, the hope that it is possible to pay bargain-bin prices for edible food (it is, but not here).

The interior of the place reminded me of a wild west saloon bar. It is split into two levels with lots of wood carving and surfaces in evidence. I didn’t stop to check if these were Chinese carvings. Or American for that matter as my attention was distracted by the massive fish tank right in the middle of the room. It looked like it was full of flood water and various marine debris (including, what was that? An eel?!) was floating around, slapping percussively against the sides. I was already reminded of the fall-out from a particularly violent natural disaster, and the accompanying queasiness didn’t make me feel like scarfing cheap Chinese food. but that was what I was here to do so I pressed on reluctantly. What initially attracted me to the place, aside from the price was the choice of six different three course menus, each costing 6 euros and comprising three courses. Good on choice I thought, small on quantity maybe, but surely not dog food? Somebody more cynical than I might see this set-up in a different way. Nobody going into your restaurant and eating a la carte? Then divide all your dishes up into 6 easy-to-manage, cut-price menus, hand write some signs and lure in the penny-pinching hordes. They got me.

Of course, If you’ve been reading these blogs up till now, you’ll have noticed a few things. Firstly, that they are currently perilously out of date and more retrospective than I would like them to be, but I’ll catch up, I promise. The other thing you might have noticed is that my judgement is occasionally impaired by an, some would say, excessive intake of alcohol over the course of a meal. I think when you have finish reading this, I will have been fully vindicated in this respect.

So after a couple of beers to settle the stomach, I ordered my food. I went for the classic combo of spring rolls, rice with three ‘delights’ and sweet and sour pork. I also ordered chicken with Soya bits just because the name aroused my curiosity. Rice grains that stick to the inside of your teeth and catch in your throat on the way down. Suspiciously gelatinous cubes of pork and frozen peas. I finally understand those people who say that when you eat Chinese food, you are likely to be hungry an hour later because when the rice arrived, it certainly looked a pile, but was mostly air and inedible vegetables. All I could do was smother the lot in soy sauce, except it had obviously been sitting in the sun so most of it was dried into a sticky slick at the bottom of the bottle.

It’s never a good sign when you see the owner and his family sitting away from the rest of the guests tucking into something completely different. They were eating what looked like wanton soup and glass noodles and it looked amazing. I had half a mind to march over and demand to share their food. Why not serve real Chinese food, you know, the food that the real Chinese people who run the restaurant eat every day? I was in a Chinese restaurant but the food I was miserably choking on could only be described as a facsimile 1950’s TV dinner version of Chinese food while I looked on enviously as steaming dumplings and fluffy rice was being doled out on the other side of the room.

At some point, one of the waitresses put down her chopsticks long enough to throw down a couple of spring rolls in front of me. They looked like lengths of dented lead pipe and when I exhumed the innards of these beasts, about 8 kilos of bean sprouts spilled out along with a microscopic cube of what looked like chicken, although it may have been a tooth and the saddest looking prawn in the whole world.

My sweet and sour pork(?) arrived shortly after, with astonishing speed. It was plonked down on the opposite side of the table and as I was sitting, for some unknown reason, at the biggest table in the restaurant, I had to stand up to reach over and get it, knocking a glass full of water onto the floor in the process. Things were not going well. Still, at least they didn’t try and charge me for the glass, or the water even.

The most distressing element of the evening was probably the texture of the meat, which was watery and gritty like ripe melon flesh. It had a layer of batter lying on top which had the look of an old postcard and the sweet and sour sauce was neither sweet nor sour but curiously salty.

To get me through this difficult time of self-abuse, I had resorted to more beer. I wonder if they even have a wine list, or whether it has been used to wrap spring rolls. It’s not really the sort of place where one orders wine, unless you want it served out of a Don Simon carton at your table by a depressed looking man in a white dress. Of course, my squash playing dining companion ordered wine and this is what he got. He also ordered dessert and coffee, which I avoided. His dessert was a pineapple ring from a can on a dirty glass plate and his cappuccino (he must surely have seen that the place wasn’t up to providing such rare and mystical brews?) mysteriously morphed into a glass of lukewarm instant coffee somewhere along the chain. I could see the undisolved granules floating in it from where I sat. He sent it back three times and then eventually gave up.

To show some solidarity to my new friend, I also ordered dessert. As the choice consisted of pineapple or the ubiquitous flan, I went for the flan, partly to make the others jealous and partly because I didn’t fancy pineapple from a rusty tin. So the flan appeared, still in its plastic supermarket pot and I ate it and it was the nicest thing about the meal and then I paid and then I left. Walking out into the Seville Autumn, the Giralda glowing majestically above me to my right, the bright Iberian sunshine lighting up the golden bricks of the cathedral I mused that that alone was worth paying six Euros for and then went off to find something to eat.