Colonel Saab is not your average curry house: the tasting menu costs £90, and a giant fish tank is nowhere to be seen. Its starry clientele, who include Jude Bellingham and Keir Starmer, may therefore have been alarmed by recent reports that the restaurant closed temporarily after receiving a zero food hygiene rating (the lowest on the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme) from Westminster Council. But if my experience is anything to go by, they shouldn’t hesitate to visit more eateries on the council’s naughty list.
This year, in the name of social media engagement, I’ve eaten at 13 zero or one-star-rated restaurants and counting. Some have been a tad suspicious. Like the central London chicken shop – its walls decorated with phone boxes and double-decker buses – where £18 bought me a pallid burger and an uncomfortably private dining experience. Most, however, have been a pleasure.
They tend to be small and family-run – often by recent immigrants for whom cooking is not an escape from the nine-to-five but a way to make an honest living. It may be a cliché, but walking into their restaurants is like walking into their homes: you’re met with a warmth that’s vanishingly rare in a scene dominated by hipster joints whose staff treat your presence as an imposition and big chains that process you from QR code to feedback survey with cold efficiency.
At Lazeez, a Kurdish spot in Liverpool, nobody tried to nudge me into spending a fiver on a handful of olives or 14 quid on a ‘frozen marg’. Instead, I was greeted with a complimentary bowl of steaming hot lentil soup. Moments later, another waiter appeared with a second bowl. Realising their mistake, they simply smiled and popped it down next to me. That’s hospitality for you. Generosity is where it starts and ends. Naturally, I ate both. It would have been rude not to.
The chicken shawarma that followed could have fed five men – or one Jim Royle. Assembled by hand rather than defrosted on a spit, the meat was wrapped in a devilishly spicy bark. The hummus was plentiful and reassuringly grainy. Freshly baked bread was a fine foil for the chicken and doubled as a surprisingly effective makeshift napkin. Each time I emptied the little pot of chilli sauce, another appeared – on the house, despite my protestations. The room was joyously free of weight-loss jabbers poking at their plates. A group of blind men joked and gesticulated; mature students celebrated their graduation, oblivious to the stray chunks of kebab dirtying their gowns; a father and son leaned towards each other over mountains of meat.
Nobody tried to nudge me into spending a fiver on a handful of olives or 14 quid on a ‘frozen marg’
I’d gone to Lazeez with time to kill before catching a train from Lime Street, a ten-minute walk away but another world entirely. That stonking shawarma and drink came to £15. At a local authority-approved Pret, that would have bought me a cup of coffee, pot of fruit and a misery sandwich. I was happy with my choice.
Other zero-rated joints are more off the beaten track. The A49 bus cafe is exactly that – a 1981 Leyland Atlantean double-decker parked in a lay-by between Ludlow and Leominster. The old girl would struggle to pass an MOT: rust was consuming her bodywork and you could barely see through the cooking fat on her windows. Still, the owner cooked a handsome breakfast right in front of me, barely pausing for breath during a 15-minute diatribe against the ‘communist’ Andy Burnham. You don’t get that at Nando’s. But then again, their extraction system consists of more than a couple of open bus windows.
When it was time to eat, I had a decision to make: risk the precarious outdoor furniture or settle in on the top deck. The cool kids always sit on the top deck. They are not, however, usually met by a carpet of flies and a strange collection of children’s toys. The first few tentative mouthfuls settled my nerves – the bacon, eggs and butcher’s sausage were local, well-cooked and ammonia free. The only black mark for a fry-up purist like me, was the Aldi beans. Nothing German belongs anywhere near my full English, thank you very much. The comments flooded in minutes after my review went up – ‘that bus is a notorious dogging spot. How do you not know?’ Well, I do now, and I’m still stopping for a bacon sarnie next time I’m driving past.
Elsewhere, the surprises came on the plate. At Eat and Sip, a tiny Chinese supermarket in Cardiff’s student suburbs, I unwittingly ordered China’s answer to the Wigan kebab: stir-fried noodles inside a pancake. Let’s call it the Peking Pasty. Without wishing to go all Victoria Beckham, it was a bit carbtastic for me, but trying new things is part of the fun. At Brunswick Square’s DaGe, my order sounded like the final boss in Mortal Kombat: THE BULL DEMON KING. Five varieties of beef – including tendon and tripe – bathed in a pork and chicken bone broth. Aesthetically questionable but obscenely tasty. Reader, I finished him.
Like Michelin Star watchers, we zero-hygiene connoisseurs track the fortunes of our favourite restaurants over time. When one climbs the rankings, it’s what I imagine watching your children grow up feels like. Lazeez now holds one-star; the Bus Café has climbed to the dizzying heights of three; DaGe has four. I’m proud of them all.
Everyone is welcome on the zero hygiene scene. There are no dress codes, no queues to get in, and the only idiot waving a phone about will be me. Even vegetarians are catered for: Go Falafel near St Paul’s is next on my list. I’ll see you there, Keir.
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