ES Magazine – London Evening Standard April 2001

You’ll find Shish on a pivotal corner by the Tube station, between Willesden Kebabs and Chicken Cottage. It’s Willesden Green’s first designer restaurant. So it’s a kebab restaurant, but its high concept enough for the locals to call it a Mash for Willesden. Gourmet kebabs are ‘sooo Willesden Green’, my friends who live there tell me. Upstairs in the bar, surrounded by cream leatherette seating, you could be in Soho.

The bar serves fantastically cheap mezze at £1.95 per dish, along with cocktails and everything you need for a good night’s poshish drinking. We settled down here to wait for one of the two coveted booths downstairs to come free. The clientele is young and varied, from wonky haircut trendies to a Steve Owen lookalike.

Unless you are an Antipodean who likes sport, Willesden is short of decent drinking venues, so somewhere with slender waitresses walking around with trays full of champagne cocktails is very agreeable. Shish has six house wines, selected to complement the spicy menu. We ordered the Soave, which was virtually off-licence price and incredibly fresh and moreish.

The selection of cold mezze we chose was perfect for a girls’ night out and we scooped it up with a herby mixture of breads. The Lebanese aubergine salad was meaty and smoky, the Afghan pumpkin salad worked wonders with a very boring vegetable, the roasted beetroot salad and Chinese green bean salad were fresh, light and lovely.

There was an old mix of diners eating at the little booths, tables, and snaky-steel food bar downstairs. The service was efficient and invisible, though the staff were quite stern when I lit up. Only meat gets smoked down here.

Shish does the only fresh juices in the area, just like the proper kebab houses you find in Damascus, Beirut and Edgware Road. It has Eastern-influenced art on the walls and plays Middle Eastern pop music, but it doesn’t try to be Momo or self-consciously ethnic. Concrete pillars and an entire glass frontage give it a modern mood.

Kebabs are the most maligned and misunderstood food. My Afghan chicken shish was simply flavoured with lemon, garlic and olive oil, and tasted great. The Persian chicken with saffron, turmeric and citrus fruits, and a Halloumi shish made the others happy but, as Willesden dwellers and Shish obsessives, they are not that objective. You can’t compare these kebabs to the quality of those in some of London’s best ethnic kebab restaurants – particularly the excellent Topkapi on Marylebone High Street. But you come to Shish for the whole deal, which is not something you can say of many kebab houses. At closing time the staff said, ’Can we see you all tomorrow for another good night at Shish?’ Not something you’d hear in the West End.