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.
