Shawarma Kebabs

Why has the word got MacDonalds when it could have shawarma joints?

Get a 'fat lady's leg' of tightly packed, succulent chicken and put it on a vertical rotisserie (you also get beef shawarmas), then slice it off when cooked by the coals or gas grilles behind it. For some reason the best of them put a lump of fat and an orange or lemon on top of the whole shebang. Now chop up the sliced, cooked chicken in the hot fat that collects on the tray below the cooking kebab, then scoop it up into an opened out Arabic bread that's been warming at the back of the tray and add some garlic paste, pickle and a couple of chips. Wrap it up in a twist of clean, thin white paper and present it to the happy purchaser for Dhs 3, which is less than a dollar. It used to be Dhs 2.5 before the price of petrol went up.

The result is the ultimate fast food: piping hot, clean, nutritious, inexpensive and fundamentally delicious, aromatic and savoury, the bite of pickle and the slightly spicy taste of the chicken (marinated in sumak), salt, pepper and lemon juice. The chicken is always just a bit too salty, like a great bar snack. You just want more of the juicy bits to ameliorate the salt, so you just eat more. I've been eating shawarmas for 20 years now and still love them like that first bite. Why they haven't taken over the world is a major mystery. If you're in London and want to try shawarma, go to Green Park. Wander the streets thereabout and you'll bump into shawarmas. If you're lucky, a shawarma pimp will run into you.

I once ran a big editorial piece on shawarmas in the BBC Gulfwide magazine wot I used to edit and produce. It was a great piece of silly fantasy (the piece, not the magazine. The magazine had real people writing for it like John Beasant, Simon Tiptree, Anne Malin and Tuesday Belgravia): pages of sheer idiocy illustrated with old line drawings of Turkish Beys and photos of bedouin tents in the Jordanian black sands. The idea was that shawarmas were actually animals and were being hunted to extinction. I even had a quote from TE Lawrence that used a colon in it (he was very fond of colons and no, I'm not being rude) for absolute authenticity. The article ended with a fax number for 'Save Our Shawarmas' or SOS. We got faxes of support. I was so happy with myself. But then if you're wandering around this Wiki, you'll already have worked out that I am incredibly easily amused.