Tag: halal snack pack

I sat out on the first order from Granville Kebab House on our run of nights, but after letting my colleagues test the waters on night one, I took part on night two.

Contrary to the opinions of my colleagues, I did not feel that this lamb kebab ($17.50) was the best. I would rate it in the bottom quartile of lamb kebabs I’ve had, purely because of the quality of the meat was lacking. While it’s usually nice to find a kebab with something resembling actual meat as opposed to mystery meat, I found the meat in this kebab to be unpleasantly chewy and gristly, with at least a couple of mouthfuls where the meat was impossible to chew to a small enough particle size to swallow, and had to be discreetly spat out instead. Factors counting in favour of this kebab however include its huge size, though another factor detracting is the $1 surcharge for tabouli. Perhaps a mystery-meat and chicken mix kebab would be a bit better.

I had only a single soggy bottom chip from this large snack pack ($22), but I wanted to add this photo to show just how huge and heaped it was. The concave upper lid was packed to the absolute max. I appreciate the effort, but would appreciate it more if the portion sizes and prices were both smaller.

Granville Kebab House
17 South St, Granville NSW 2142
0410 801 801

In the days preceding a particularly tricky quiz, we gave up on cooking and essentially just ate out and ordered delivery – reactivating a long-dormant DoorDash account, which had been the source of much of this blog’s content in the 2020 to 2021 era.

We ordered a Medium Mix Snack Pack ($21) with garlic, hummus, and chilli sauce. As may be evident from the photo, they forgot to put the chilli sauce in, netting us a very small partial refund from the DoorDash platform (though I wish they had just put it on).

The mix of mystery doner meat and actual chicken was of a standard quality. The size of this medium snack pack was actually quite large, and I wish they would have offered a smaller version for an appropriately smaller price. The chips, not pictured in this photo as it was beneath the mountain of meat and the wrong combination of sauces were actually excellent – extremely crispy, despite surviving a delivery trip, and remained so throughout the meal. It’s just a shame the lack of chilli let it down. I consider it much more essential than hummus.

Luckily the regular mixed kebab ($18) with tabouli, garlic, chilli, and hummus came with all the requested ingredients. It was good, though I have to say $18 is getting up there for a kebab.

Smokey’s Kebabs
138 Liverpool Rd, Enfield NSW 2136

Actively bad.

My beef-only mixed kebab (why?) was one of the worst I’ve had in recent memory. In fact, the only kebab I remember that was worse than this was at Ali Baba’s at Melbourne Tullamarine Airport, which I think I ate in on around 2014-15. Problems with this kebab, aside from getting my order wrong, included the salad and tabouli, which was unusually hard, jagged, and non-fragrant. In addition to this there was just something off about the flavour of the kebab, a certain wrongness that was difficult to put into words. Having had hundreds of kebabs in my day (I used to be quite the connoisseur before I started this blog and broadened my culinary horizons) I know what a kebab should taste like, and this wasn’t it.

“If you hated Jimmy’s so much, why did you go back?” I hear you ask. My second run-in with Jimmy’s was outside of my control. One of my nocturnist colleagues had decided to arrange a kebab run around 1AM, and unfortunately Jimmy’s was one of the only places open at this time with delivery to our workplace. While the salad snack pack wasn’t as bad as the kebab roll I had had a few weeks prior, the same not-rightness remained, with the dry, hard, and nonfragrant tabouli, as well as the weird taste of the chicken meat. Luckily my snack pack was drowned in sufficient sauce to mostly cover up the strange and subpar taste of the meats within.

VERDICT
No stars.
Go somewhere else. Or just skip the meal.

Jimmy’s Kebab
618 Church St, North Parramatta NSW 2151

I first started going to Brothers Kebab’s back in 2015. At the time, Brothers Kebabs was well known for its good service, their signature “what’s up brother?” greeting, and the fact that they were one of the few kebab shops in the area to serve actual lamb meat, not just doner kebab mystery meat. Brothers Kebab was one of my go-to kebab places in the local area, and I made multiple trips to Brothers Kebabs despite there being other places closer to my home.

Flash forward to 2020 and I’m once again living and working in the local area. I have, over the course of the year, visited or ordered kebabs and snack packs from Brothers Kebabs a number of times, often during a night shift or on the way home in the evening.

The quality at Brothers Kebabs has, by and large, dropped since its heyday five years ago. Every time I have one of their kebab rolls it’s a toss up as to whether or not the salad will taste like literal garbage – I think that their ingredients are often just teetering on the edge of an unsafe level of freshness. The good ones are good, but the bad ones have quite an offputting aroma to them. In addition to this, I think that their lamb meat has dropped in quality over the past few years – it is now mostly composed of fatty, gristly bits where I remember it used to have a bit more actual meat.

On my most recent visit to Brothers Kebabs I asked for a mixed snack pack with half tabouli and half chips. The guy said “sure”, but what I ended up getting was just a normal doner mystery meat snack pack. It really wasn’t what I asked for, but I was too tired by this point to fight it. The chips were fresh and really good, but that’s about it. The doner meat was the same doner meat you would get anywhere. I really wish I had gotten what I asked for.

VERDICT
Brothers Kebabs used to be one of my favourite kebab places in the Rockdale area, but it has since fallen from grace. Go if you want to be surprised by what you get.

3/5

Brother Kebabs
315 Princes Hwy, Banksia NSW 2216
(02) 9567 4194