London's best shawarma is BACK!!!

Late night takeaways are a fact of life.

We've all eaten our share of dodgy fried chicken and toilet-grade kebabs when stricken with ferocious hunger pangs shortly after leaving the pub. Beer can do that to you.

Got a much better takeaway than the man on the bus

Perhaps the only real downside of the longer opening hours we've enjoyed for some years now is that most of the food options available at chucking-out time are invariably dire.

Well, almost invariably dire. There are, believe it or not, a few very special places where you can actually get something decent to eat at 12:37 AM. 

Do they have Vanuatuan takeaways in El Salvador?

I remarked the other day that it was almost impossible to find food that identified as 'United Arab Emiratean' in Dubai. (Which is in the United Arab Emirates if you needed reminding!)

This got me thinking.

Think, think, think went my brain, like some sort of vast, organic thinking machine.

And I came to the conclusion that this criticism is possibly a bit harsh, if only because the UAE is far from alone in having a dismally flaccid presence in the World League of Food.

Want to know what I'm banging on about? Hold tight for some Gastro-geopolitical discourse.

In support of Shisha

Like a lot of people I’ve started taking ‘x is bad for you’ and ‘a increases your chances of developing b by c%’ stories with a dangerously generous pinch of salt.

I'm sceptical because if you do the maths and calculate the purported compound effects based on real life it soon becomes farcical, with scenarios giving you a greater than 100% chance of dying before the age you've already reached.

And that's because even if the conclusions are technically correct, they’re only correct within an isolated study and reflect averages rather than realistic expectation. Like how nobody has exactly 2.4 children, I guess.

But the media loves this shit, and the latest doomsdayish revelation is that smoking a shisha pipe is the equivalent of 100 cigarettes, apparently.