Late-night kebab shops glow bright in the hearts of most right-thinking Londoners. They are beacons amid the wreckage of a night out — emotional A&Es built upon the reliable sensory pleasures of raging ocakbasi heat, squirted bottles of garlic sauce and doner meat skilfully winnowed off a twirling spit. Despite an unfair historic reputation as the preserve of the terminally leathered, they are committed to an almost quaint degree of cooked-to-order freshness. Even when they are not very good, they deal in a certain honesty, soul and simplicity.
Or at least they normally do. At Kebhouze — a new Oxford Street spot that claims to be “the biggest kebab shop in the UK” — they have taken one look at all this romance, tradition and culturally prideful common sense and basically hurled a stick of dynamite at it.
The main entrance area is a cluster-headache of cherry-red corrugated metal, throbbing neon signage, and hip hop cranked to sternum-juddering volume. The kitchens are hidden away in a basement, perhaps to better obscure the fact that, as per the heavily asterisked menu, many of the dishes appear to be prepared from frozen. And when your order is ready it is announced, not by a gruffly avuncular Turkish man wearing a thin gold chain, but by trilling rail terminus pips and a computerised, Squid Game-style voice over a tannoy system.
Squid Game? A dystopia in which economic strife has caused people to make questionable choices? That feels about right. Because though I went to Kebhouze thinking it would be an entertaining journey into the fast-casual heart of darkness, I left thoroughly depressed about what its probable success says about the decidedly “this’ll do” future of mainstream, TikTok-age dining.
Some backstory is probably necessary. Kebhouze (I hear a brain cell evaporating each time I type that) is the creation of Gianluca Vacchi, a multi-millionaire Italian businessman and internet personality who looks like a sort of lavishly tattooed MMA Captain Birdseye. Launched in late 2021, the chain now has branches in Milan, Rome, Ibiza and beyond, each one a node in a fast-growing empire that wants to “own” the kebab space. Its marketing bluster has seen them make that “UK’s biggest” claim about this 100-seat opening, despite the fact 220-cover Green Lanes behemoths like Gökyüzü exist. Arriving at its three-storey location for a recent lunch, I found sprawl but emptiness.
The owner is a multi-millionaire Italian businessman who looks like a sort of lavishly tattooed MMA Captain Birdseye
Still, let the record show that the first few dishes were at least vaguely competent. The Little Italy — essentially a chicken doner wrap, rigged with black olives and sun-dried tomatoes — was a testament to the kebab’s failsafe allure: a cudgel of warm, decently seasoned shawarma meat that worked despite those chaotic panini fixings and a flatbread prone to disintegration. Chicken nuggets, meanwhile, were the apex of oddly nostalgic, freezer dinner blandness. But then came fries so heinously over-salted that they were basically inedible; then came a cloying, Nutella pancake with the dread flabbiness of apparent microwaving. The Big Mac-inspired Big Keb — a burger bun and mismatched garnishes clasped around gristly shavings of beef doner — practically squeaked against the molars. Kebhouze’s noisy half-heartedness feels both fascinating and grimly predictable; a calculated bet that — at a time when Greggs is planning to open 160 new branches in a year — cheapness and convenience will trump haphazard quality for diners who just want to shovel something in from the happy cocoon of a lunchtime scroll-hole. Again, they are probably going to be proven correct.
But Kebhouze’s legacy may be as an inadvertent advert for the quiet mastery and magic of the capital’s existing kebab shops (Mangal 1 and FM Mangal come to mind). I wandered down from the deserted upper floors, past a tower of unclaimed balloons and a dwindled crowd of tradesmen, shoppers and bundled-up international students. Italians do it better? Not here they don’t.
