If you've lived in Bahrain long enough, then you have experienced the sheer nerves that is getting lost in the back streets of Muharraq.
You turn corner, after corner, with roads becoming narrower and narrower. Each time you think it might be the way out to a main road, the road gets impossibly narrower.
Locals watch and help where they can, encouraging you to keep driving forward and signalling that you won’t scrape your car.
You then turn another corner, and again, the road (or is it now considered an alleyway?) become even smaller. You think to yourself, surely these are only pedestrian streets now, but again a local standing around will just smile and tell you that you can squeeze through. Though the laws of physics are starting to make you truly think you may just get stuck and must stay where you are, forever.
Well, this was how I built up my appetite last night. Getting lost, narrowly making it through teeny alleyways, and struggling to keep it together with the sweaty palms and a racing heart, that comes with a drive like this.
However, the reward was truly worth the pain.
Bu Yaqoob Grills, a small non-descript restaurant in Muharraq is luckily on a wider street (and if you just follow google maps, unlike Moi, you won’t have a hair-raising driving like I did).
Park up, order the grills (tikka, kebabs), but most importantly order the lamb chops (Riyash in Arabic). Sit down in the little accompanying room and wait for what can only be the best god damn lamb chops I’ve had in Bahrain. Big, juicy, and hot to the touch. Grab some bread to create an ‘edible glove’ and then tear in.
Bu Yaqoob. I will drive anywhere for a lamb chop like that, and I promise once you try it, you will too!
