Offering: Super Donner
Establishment: Madras Cottage, Edinburgh
Date and time: 24th December 2016, 19:27
Price: £4.80
Seating: N/A (collected and having never entered the new premises)
There are two types of people in this world: those that like their doner by the size and those that like their doner by quality. I as I'm sure you're aware fall into the latter group - I do value size but I think its important to value price and quality a little bit over size. My father though, he's a man that like the get 'bang for his buck' so to speak. As a result, for years he has enjoyed a gigantic doner kebab from the infamous Madras Cottage. Some years ago, the Cottage used to be situated by the Marionville roundabout and was heavily frequented by my father and I. It has since moved to Piershill after a dispute with the owners of the premises regarding rent left the Cottagers seeking pastures a-new. Despite this move, the quality of their offerings has remained consistent, this standard has remained the same. As always, this review will aim to explore that standard.
In most places, when you ask for the large doner, you very rarely get handed a 10 inch pizza box stuffed full of a gigantic double-sized naan bread, dark wide slithers of doner meat packed to capacity and enough chilli sauce to seep through the cardboard box. What more, if you did receive such a delectable feast, you would expect it to cost north of £10, not south of five. In Madras Cottage you get all of these things. I am sensing your reaction and it's either one of two - you're wondering when this heavenly sounding place opens so you can buy 2 and freeze one for later or, and in my mind more importantly, you are asking yourself what the catch is. This review aims to cater for both of these thought processes.
Once you place the box down on the table and rip the sellotape off and lift that pizza box open, you are greeted with what looks like a large sandwich - once you lift the top half of the bread and witness the sheer volume of content you tend to feel overwhelmed. Upon closer inspection, you do notice quite a large amount of white cabbage in the salad and not only it is really chunky, it's fairly hard too. In fact, the white cabbage is pretty much what make up the vast bulk of the accompanying salad - there is almost no lettuce and even less onions - this salad is a disaster - there are no tomatoes, no jalapenos, no peppers, no carrots and barely even cucumbers (the Eamon Holmes of the salad world) - there was no chance of any coriander or even a zingy little dressing. What's that you say? OK, I gather that it was £4.80 and a week's feast for some people.
. . . around two and a half times the size of the Kebab Mahal offering - just to put things into perspective for you.
The chilli sauce is more a sweet sauce, it has no bite at all really and seems seriously overloaded with sugar. There is no salad sauce. I've never had a kebab with salad sauce from the Madras Cottage, they clearly don't serve a salad sauce. Yes, I heard you - 4.80! I know, at this rate I should just buy my own sauces and salad from a better kebab shop and disperse it over the contents of this creation; it'll still cost less than a coffee and a slice of cake.
And this is the part you have probably all been waiting for, the meat of this kebab tastes like it's a mixture of lamb and one or two other things. It does taste heavily processed though but I do suspect that there is some mutton content and maybe even some beef and/or turkey content too. If you see above, the menu also fails to explain what exactly this meat is made of, preferring to describe itself simply as "donner". It tastes pretty decent considering its ambiguity. It doesn't taste all that distinctive though, pretty boringly seasoned and a bit on the bland side, it is however a very salty tasting kebab - I imagine it contains way more than the recomended daily salt intake for the average person. It is because of meat like this though that all those world weary, health conscious, perspicacious types are critical of our beloved babs - you know the type; the kind of person that ridicules you for your doner offering whilst taking a bite of their rank looking sausage!
The naan bread is pretty decent, incredibly large, though maybe a little too small for an even distribution of its delightful toppings but it is £4.80. It's a thick naan too, not really much like the naan from Kebab Mahal. This kebab is also around two and a half times the size of the Kebab Mahal offering - just to put things into perspective for you.
This kebab could easily be shared between 2-3 people and if you buy it and consume it all yourself then I salute you. I will also call A & E. Because this kebab was collected by my father, I was not in a position to ask if they made the chilli sauce themselves and similarly, I was in no position to see if there was any seating area in the premises.
I will give you my verdict: the kebab is £4.80. At this price, you really can't go too far wrong as someone is bound to be impressed by the sheer magnitude of this monsterously sized doner! With this in mind, I am going to award it an above average score, however, if you are like my father and value quantity over quality, I reccomend you add four marks (Marx?) to my verdict. Either way, everyone should try this kebab - take it as a gift; bring it to your Bar Mitzvahs; take it instead of grapes to the hospital or why not bribe the police?
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