Döner Brutal

Review

Kebab is the hottest medicine

The culinary outpost of St. Charles Pharmacy has a new game plan: After street food classic one, burgers, the so-often repurposed tiny eatery now serves kebabs. "Brutal", it screams in orange neon lettering from the stone façade. As it turns out, the word here primarily stands for reduction.
"We took more out than we put in," says Xaver Kislinger (Hotel am Brillantengrund, Café Kraus), who is currently running the snack project with Javier Mancilla (Heuer, Café Kraus) and fermentation specialist Sendi Gbinia (Das Vulgo).
Four months of preliminary work went into product development, i.e. researching, selecting producers, fermenting and testing. The immodest goal: to rehabilitate the fast food icon kebab. "When it's made well, it can be really awesome," says Kislinger, in other words: kebab brutal.
To achieve this, he and his colleagues have reduced the ingredients to the essentials: Bread, meat, onion, tomatoes, yogurt. Each ingredient is added in elite quality to the organic sourdough bread specially baked in a bakery in Favoriten.
The beef shoulder from Styrian organic beef, sliced wafer-thin, is marinated for 24 hours in homemade garum spice made from the meat trimmings, layered on the skewer and marinated for another 24 hours before being grilled.
They marinate the red onions and cocktail tomatoes themselves, the latter with star anise, fennel and caraway seeds. Add yogurt and salt - and you're done.
The result tastes really good, the meat is tender but with a bite and subtle spice, each component unmistakable. Dill and parsley give the Brutal kebab a pleasant freshness, chilli flakes a passable spiciness. Really great!
And the vegetarian version too: homemade seitan, boiled, then deep-fried, given a smoky note via miso porcini mushroom ferment and packed into the bread with the same toppings as the meat version (€ 4.90 or € 7.40 with extra meat or seitan). Both varieties can also be ordered with homemade, super fluffy langos, with the aforementioned toppings aside (€ 6.40 or € 9.60). Once again really good. No wonder everyone is queuing up here again.
The self-service fridge has homemade ayran and iced tea, a small selection of natural wines, sparkling water, beer and popular soft drinks ("that's what people want").
As a daring accompaniment to kebabs, the guys from the Saint-Charles Spirits mix white negroni (€12), vermouth soda (€7) or amaro soda (€9) and fill them into apothecary bottles - "a gimmick".
Summary:
At St. Charles Alimentary, they now go to great lengths to make a kebab sandwich that rewards you for waiting in line.

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