I work in a kebab shop – there’s a popular item on the menu I’d NEVER order, and the truth about the doner meat

STUMBLING into the kebab shop for a greasy doner at the end of a boozy night out is a ritual for many Brits.

A staggering 1.3 million kebabs are sold every day in the UK and that warm pitta bread stuffed with succulent meat and oozing with chilli and garlic has long been the nation’s favourite. 

Getty

Getty

There are 20,000 kebab shops in the UK and between them they sell a staggering 2500 tonnes of lamb and chicken a week.

said to add £2.8 billion to the UK economy a year. The first kebab shop  – The Istanbul – started trading in the UK in Soho in the 1940s.

But some owners are far more picky than their customers and our kebab shop owner from West London, who has been in the business for 15 years, admits he would never eat what he dishes up. 

Speaking to Fabulous, he says, “The idea of putting chips or rice in a kebab is disgusting for me but it’s what our customers want, so we have to go along with it.

“In fact one of our most common requests is for more chips. You’d never find that in Turkey – there it’s just meat, salad and sauce.”

The most popular kebab is the doner – with the huge rotating skewers of meat dubbed elephant’s foot. But despite always looking very similar they can vary wildly.

 “Lots of restaurants buy ready-made meat. You have to use a new one every day and they come in different sizes – for example you’d use a much bigger one on Fridays and Saturdays which are easily the busiest days, as people come straight from the pub to us,” reveals our kebab maestro. 

“We make ours by marinading the meat for 12 hours and then putting it in on the skewers by hand. The most experienced chefs like me can do it in 20 minutes – but the average time to make a big one is about 40 minutes.”

And chili sauce is another way a kebab can be elevated beyond a drunken snack.

He tells us: “I make my chilli sauce from scratch and it takes at least six hours to make the perfect one.

“But a lot of kebab houses just use chilli powder, tomato puree, garlic and water.

“And we get freshly baked bread every morning, while others use stuff that can keep for months in its packaging. 

“It annoys me that over half of my customers are drunk, coming straight from the pub on a Friday night and don’t appreciate the time and effort I’ve put into making their kebab.

“Sometimes it’s tempting to take the same shortcuts that other kebab houses do, but I can’t, I have too much pride in my craft.”

But even though our kebab chef takes care in his selection of ingredients, he rarely indulges himself – for two reasons. 

I’ve only had to call the police once – and that was when two women in their 20s came in

Kebab shop owner

“I can’t eat them every day,” he says, “Because I’ll get fat. There’s a lot of fattening sauces and bread in with the salad.

“Instead I’ll have hummus or chicken soup. And if I do eat one, I make it specially for me as I like mine much spicier than the English can handle.”

Though his customers are most likely to be men, slightly worse for wear, the biggest issue he’s ever had is with two women. 

He recalls, “I’ve only had to call the police once – and that was when two women in their 20s came in.

Extra meat

“They were very drunk and when I refused to serve them they smashed some plates and started squirting around the bottles of sauces all over my other customers.

“Luckily we have CCTV so when they denied it we could prove what they’d done.

“It pays to be nice because we will always put in a bit of extra meat or give polite customers some baklava for nothing.”

Weirdly we can usually estimate the amount of meat we’ll need on any one day correctly so we rarely waste any of that

Kebab shop owner

Other than drunk women, the most annoying customers are the fussy ones. 

He reveals: “We have people coming in and asking us to chop up the tomatoes in the salad smaller.

“And weirdly we can usually estimate the amount of meat we’ll need on any one day correctly so we rarely waste any of that.

“The thing we end up throwing away the most often at the end of the day is…those tomatoes!”