The Two Minute Review: Salama Lama

Ronan Doyle
2 hours ago
2 min read

Post-plunge treat-seekers fresh from the sauna round the corner. Muslim families in for a feast after visiting the Mosque next door. TikTok trend-trawlers trekking to Tallaght from every corner of the city. In the hour you'll need to spend sweating over the meat-piled portions at Salama Lama, you'll get a good glimpse at the impressively mixed crowd that makes up modern Dublin – and the exciting new food bringing them together.

What should we get?

One of those TikTok draws is BYOB. Not beer, but bags – of crisps. Whether it’s engineered virality ingenuity, or sheer dumb luck from some customer’s off-menu request getting legs online, the €10 special stuffs your choice of chips with... well, chips and all the trimmings - carb overload if ever there was one. The poster, and most taking cues from it, goes with Doritos; we swung by Dunnes down the road and got a bigger bag of Blanco Niño on offer for cheaper instead. If that’s what it takes to get them in, so be it – they’ll likely be back for the rest.

Like the beef. In a saner world, what would be viral is a little food truck hiding a smoker, where brisket spends most of a day being teased to a tenderness that’s hard to believe. It’s hard to be leaving any behind too – spread through a grilled soft sub (€15) with cheese, caramelised onions and no shortage of house sauces, the dripping shreds dare you to indulge one gut-busting bite further. Skin-on seasoned fries, similarly drenched, exert the same self-destructive pull.

House-spiced, thin-shaved fatty chicken thigh shawarma in traditional saj (€13.50) is spiked with pickles and snuggled up against fries, rolled tight to be sliced and served up with more chicken atop the fries beside – they don’t skimp on meat around here. The unleavened flatbread’s thin-rolled layers have more bite than the soft sub, and lightness to let post-workout punters pretend they've made a healthier choice.

We’re not sure a menu still counts as secret if you invite people to ask, but then where’d be the good in keeping this quiet. The dinosaur platter (€35) could as easily be named for the Jurassic sized portion as the distinct likelihood that eating it all could set you up for extinction – this is to share, ideally among several. That’s not least cos it’s almost literally got it all, from more sub somehow made better just slicked with garlic and cheese, to rice and chips piled with both brisket and shawarma, all liberally lashed with more house sauces. You won’t miss much by going all-in on this only.

In the slow slip-slide of beef from the bone, in the fight over who gets to pick the last morsel off it, in the uneasy heave up from benches more strained than before, there’s a sense of something special happening in the crowd Salama Lama has cribbed together. Not since Barry Stephens' smoker struck up over at Chubby’s have we been so excited by a piece of meat. We’re betting it won’t be long before they follow his lead from food truck to bigger things.