What makes a kebab a kebab and why do we like eating things on sticks? That is the important question I have been mulling as we hit the steamy barbecue season.
The debate was inspired not by kebabs, in fact, but by yakitori, the typically refined Japanese version of kebabs that essentially involve cooking every body part of a chicken on small skewers, and which also seems to be London’s most recent Japanese love affair following sushi, ramen, udon, and so on.
Yakitori though is really the extreme of food on stick eating. Take the menu of Junsei in Marylebone (excellent, by the way), which breaks the chicken down into ten elements ranging from gizzard to wings and cooks them to dripping succulence on half size kebab sticks. It is what the Japanese might refer to as made by a shokunin – an almost untranslatable word that means someone who has perfected his or her craft, perhaps the closest comparative being ‘artisan’ but it goes much deeper than that.
But back to kebabs.
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