Bask, watch and feast at Soho’s new Iranian hole-in-the wall kabab shop

stewed with saffron, onions, potatoes and barberries and jujeh kabab tond, poussin taken to a dark and juicy place, thanks to sumac, red peppers, chilli and ferocious heat, that I suspect it has never been before.

These and also chenjeh kabab of marinated lamb rump eclipse koobideh kabab of minced Cabrito goat shoulder — although i t ’s g re a t that this byproduct of the dairy industry is being used — which lacks vivacious seasoning and kabab torki, a take on a post-piss-up doner complete with chips that at the price ( £ 1 2 . 5 0) loses quite a lot in translation.

Side dishes include fermented vegetables which lead one of my chums to thank me later for making her microbiome happy, but what makes me joyful is house rice with tadig, that

brilliant conceit of topping the fluffy grains with the crisp disc from the bottom of the cooking pot made by the significant amount of goat butter in which it sizzles.

The single dessert is a baklava ice cream sandwich provided by the St Albans company Darlish, a sort of Middle-Eastern riposte to those Italian sorbet-stuffed lemons — some say the origins of ice cream lie with the Persian Empire in the fifth century BC.

Drinks kick off with sharbats made with fruit cordial, some of them spiked with alcohol. Lashings of sparkling water and too much ice make these drinks, we think, a bit of a washout. The wine list is punitively short. Italian Monte del Fra Custoza 2017, the cheaper of the two whites at £28, ably conveys a disapproval of drinking.

Corporate backing seems to have rationalised, prettified sanitised and bean-counted what is a rip-roaring tradition into what might even be a proto-chain. Service is full of too much information and would do well not to treat two women lunching like escapees from a care home who have never come across an aubergine before.

It has however conferred a terrific look. “It feels like it’s in a reclaimed building in a bombed-out city with crumbling plaster and traces of w a l l p a p e r. It is distasteful and pretentious but looks fantastic anyway, so sod it”, writes my friend Kate.