So perhaps I should explain why I’ve been relatively off-radar for the last few months.

Shortly after new year fellow gastro-scribe Oliver Thring and I sat down over a cup of tea and a hobnob and wagged chins over the prospect of doing something street foody. As you probably know there are some very good vibrations surrounding the street food scene in London at the moment (doff of cap to Petra Barren and Richard Johnson, among others), and we wanted to get involved.

After several hobnobs (me) and at least two cups of Yorkshire tea (Ollie), we landed on kebabs. Stigmatised, dirty, drunken kebabs. And we decided to make the best ones in London.

Cue training montage of spreadsheets and bike rides around town eating five kebabs a day. And then off to Turkey, where…

We ate...

Met some nice locals...

Saw the biggest kebab shop in Istanbul...

Ate some more...

Celebrated the 4 minutes that it wasn't raining....

Saw (what's left of) the Temple of Artemis...

Got sleepy...

Drank some Turkish wine...

Ate some more...

…and eventually came back as fat and happy as a Christmas goose, with what we think is a pretty good idea of what makes a truly delicious kebab.

Ours will consist of beautiful British meat – chicken or lamb – that has gone nowhere near a mincer and has been marinated to within an inch of its life, red cabbage pickled in pomegranate molasses, onions with lemon, sumac and parsley, roasted chillies, smoked garlic buffalo yoghurt, bruising chilli sauces, and fresh tomato and cucumber salsa, all wrapped up in warm lavash bread – none of this cardboard pitta at the bottom of a soggy wrapper nonsense.

We’re calling it Kebab Kitchen, and we’re launching this Friday night at The StockMKT in Bermondsey. Would be great to see some of you there.

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Click here to see our website.

Click here for Ollie’s side of the story.

Here for our Twitter page.

And here for the Facebook page.