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A Cotswold Farmshop
The family-run Gloucester Service Station in the Cotswolds is a distinctive pit stop filled with goods from local farmers and artisans.
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The family-run Gloucester Service Station in the Cotswolds is a distinctive pit stop filled with goods from local farmers and artisans.
PG
I feel a sense of shame when I speak with Koray Uğur, the longtime owner of , a fast-food eatery located by the car park of St Martin's Village in the Sydney suburb of Blacktown. I've been eating there (with alarming regularity) since it opened in 2001, but it's only now that I'm hearing the story of exactly how their legendary charcoal-grilled meat is prepared.
"The process of preparing the lamb in particular is probably the most interesting – it's certainly the most labour-intensive, explains Uğur.
"When the lamb arrives, it's placed in the cool room to bleed out for a day."
(Please note, readers, the lamb has already gone to the great meadow in the sky by this point.)
"And then I marinate it in our special sauces and spices for a further two days so that the meat is super tender. Only after those three days of preparation is it ready to be cooked over the coals."
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It's little wonder Uğur takes his food so seriously; offering Turkish cuisine to the Australian public is a family business he was born into, and one – despite studying architecture – he felt compelled to continue. "When I was growing up, my parents ran the food for all the stadiums like the Sydney Cricket Ground so it's familiar territory to me," he explains. "When my dad bought the site for King of Kebabs, I initially tried to steer my own path, but in 2010 I felt the call to come back and run it myself."
What was it, I ask, that made him come back? He exhales as he thinks his response through. "For me, I think it's all about the joy of getting people together, sharing a meal and sharing good times."
It's all about the joy of getting people together.
Having had much experience at dining at his establishment, I would argue that Uğur may not be designing buildings, but building dreams. Queues of locals and passersby can be seen out the front of his eatery day and night, each one keen to get their fill of Uğur's kebabs, pides, pizzas and yes, charcoal meat.
While the lamb shish remains his personal favourite, he notes that the mixed shish plate of lamb, chicken and Adana served on a bed of Turkish bread, alongside various sauces, salads and rice, is the dish that flies out the door. Well, that and the kıymalı (mince) pide.
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As a teen, I lived nearby and spent long afternoons in that pothole-riddled car park (as it was back then), learning to ride a skateboard, jump-starting cars and trying to pick up the cute boy I worked alongside in the adjacent supermarket after school. This was all pre-King of Kebabs of course, but post-opening, I also recall ordering a kebab and pacing nervously while my boyfriend went to ask my parent's permission for my hand in marriage, and how a few years later, we picked up boxes of pide in anticipation of the announcement to my family that I'd now be eating for two.
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Today, I could easily make use of the indoor tables (they've expanded substantially over the years), but there's nothing I love more than sitting by the car park, watching the cars pull out and mentally travelling back to a time when my fringe was super high and everything – the career, the marriage and the children – was all still ahead of me.
Uğur may not be designing buildings, but building dreams.
It may be a time-travel device for me, but for everyone else, King of Kebabs is essentially a killer lunch spot in the best location for the job, reminds Uğur.
"It's the perfect place for a business that's geared around convenience to be. Customers don't have to waste time looking around for parking; they can just pull up out front, then grab and go," he says.
"We also have a lot of shops and services next door so it's natural for someone to pop by to get their car cleaned or pick up something from the pharmacy and go, 'Ooh, I might grab a bite to eat'.
The waft of meat cooking over the coals might have something to do with it, I venture, and he laughs. "Yeah, it's pretty hard to resist."
My question: Why resist at all?
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