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Theme Magazine - August 2005
Which brings me to the lovely Shish, exotic fast food. The Turkish restaurant in Bishops Bridge Road , W2 didn't promise food from the fifteen corners of the world, cooked with more kicks and twists than a version of Riverdance. It promised fresh food, grilled fast. It didn't offer exceptional unique everlasting love but it offered its heart and a cosy embrace. I was expecting it to be OK and it was delightful. Outside of Shish there's a quote that boasts the new way to fast food and indeed why should fast always be associated with trashy and painful? Why should deferred gratification be a sublime pleasure?
Shish gets it right. A mixed mezze can include cucumber wasabi, houmous, Lebanese aubergines and you can test out a worth of a restaurant with a falafel. There's nothing worse than ones that come powdery or too greasy, too soft or too hard. These ones were great. The chicken and lamb had been grilled as you watch. You can have it done in the manner of what they call the Silk Road which means influenced by the road the silk would travel in ancient times so this road would go from Rome through the Gobi Desert and on to China. In other words this is a way that can embrace traditional Turkish lamb koftas, Italian marinated chickens to Indonesian flavoured satays. It can be doused in coconut milk and still maintain a kind of fresh grillness. Dishes come as wraps or on their own. Spencer and I had the chicken and quince. It was marinated with a puree of quince, apple, lemon and olive oil. 50p from this purchase will be donated to Action Against Hunger so you see caring food. Food that feeds the world. There's a rather sweet little quote in the menu which says all food is soul food - to treat it otherwise is to court indigestion. There's chronic and metaphysical.
I felt this was a quote that cared and wasn't just random in its placement. You can tell when food has been prepared with love. It makes you happy and you do digest it better, I'm convinced. The homemade halva ice cream is not to be missed. Halva on its own is flakily beautiful and intense but with ice cream it's lifted to its own paradise. I like Shish because it ticks all the boxes. It does what it says it's going to do!
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