It was a Skip the Dishes driver.

I opened the washroom door for a second or two before seeing him and realizing he forgot to lock it. He was standing a comfortable distance from the toilet, calmly firing piss with the accuracy of a Super Soaker 250. I apologized immediately—he was friendly, smiled it off, and told me it was okay.

And I realized something in that moment.

I’d spent years absorbing this bizarre racial mythology about men with more melanin than me and their size from movies and internet memes: Jason Luv, Barry Wood, those guys in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac.

Pop culture tried to convince me that seeing one in person was supposed to alter my self-esteem forever.

Instead, it was just… normal.

Not tiny. Not mythical. Just regular. Same general equipment as me, different pigmentation.

And weirdly, I felt like I’d been lied to.

Which, honestly, is kind of how I feel about Swiss Donair.

Don’t get me wrong—it’s a good donair joint, and I admire owner Wajdi Chehimi’s hustle. Since taking ownership in 2004 at the age of 20, he’s turned Swiss into a well-oiled machine: tons of staff, fast service, no hiccups. A Northside institution.

The donair itself is solid: steamed pita, melted cheese, about 10 oz of Athena beef donair meat shaved off the spit and grilled, lettuce, tomatoes, onions. No other veggie options. Wrapped tight in foil, bagged with an extra little sack—invented by Wajdi’s father—to collect the runoff sweet sauce, which I tried dipping my fries into before eventually switching to ketchup because the sauce got a little thin after running through the meat and veggies.

And Swiss makes great fries: golden, fluffy inside, dusted with an orange Cajun-type seasoning.

It’s a quality product.

But because Northsiders—people from Evansdale, Beaumaris, Lorelei—talk about Swiss like it’s the undisputed GOAT, you go in expecting perfection.

It isn’t perfect.

The meat is Athena—a beef-and-soy product lots of donair shops already use—and it could’ve used more spice. The vegetable distribution is flawed too. Almost all the tomatoes were sitting at the bottom, leaving the upper half lettuce-dominant. I prefer my tomatoes evenly dispersed throughout the donair. As I get older, I need that lycopene for prostate health.

And the sweet sauce soaked through the soft pita near the ends, turning parts of the donair into a soggy mess. Normally, I enjoy this part because it’s the meatiest bits—but the sog was overwhelming.

Still, the place clearly means something to people. I saw customers from all walks of life in there—Arab families, Indians, sixty-something white couples—and everybody seemed genuinely happy at Swiss.

It’s clean too—sure, I accidentally walked into some unexpected full-frontal nudity, but even the washroom, with its grey epoxy floor and newspaper-print wall tiles, was spotless. Elsewhere, there’s some Oilers and hockey love on the walls: a blue-and-orange Swiss Donair jersey, photos of Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, and four TVs showing the Habs beating the Sabres.

I really wanted to love the place more.

But it just didn’t have that hole-in-the-wall charm I associate with the best donair spots. It felt a little too commercialized. Too assembly-line. Too Skynet.

And honestly, I think I would’ve appreciated it more if Swiss wasn’t carrying the kind of hype no donair can realistically live up to.

Swiss Donair is really good—and far better than its namesake, Swiss Chalet (really).

But it’s not the greatest.

I know there are great artists who never wrote their own songs or played instruments—Frank Sinatra and Diana Ross among them—and I admire them too. But there’s something awe-inspiring about an artist who does everything themselves. To me, that one-person approach represents a higher level of artistry.

And that’s how I feel about donair shops that make their own meat.

I was discussing this with local chef Mai Nguyen, who competed on seasons four and seven of MasterChef Canada, at her house last week. She made donairs for a couple of friends completely from scratch—everything except the vegetables. The sweet sauce. The Greek-style pita: soft, pillowy, and stretchy. Even the meat. She didn’t rely on Athena or Aladdin like probably 80–90 percent of local donair shops do. She seasoned it herself with cayenne, oregano, and paprika. She packed it herself, too: no implosions, no leftover salad spilling onto the plate. Everything stayed exactly where it belonged.

And I felt great afterwards: satisfied but not lethargic. No greasy hangover. No heartburn—which plagues me after most donairs. Since there was no need for a nap, I indulged in margaritas, wine, and Courvoisier while voicing my disappointment with the local shops that don’t make their own meat.

If you rely on somebody else’s meat—somebody else’s seasoning, herbs, and spices—can you truly be the best? Because it isn’t your creation. It isn’t your vision.

So where does your artistry lie? In the sauces? Some places don’t even make those themselves. The vegetables—which you didn’t grow? The pita—which you brought in from a local bakery? If virtually nothing is made in-house, what exactly am I coming to you for? I can buy those same ingredients and make a donair at home.

Throughout this journey, I’ve discovered what I call pod people donairs: the same meat over and over again, with very little to distinguish one shop from the next. And because of that, I honestly struggle to call a donair shop “the best” if it doesn’t make its own meat. The very foundation of its signature product isn’t even theirs.

Which brings me to Famous Donair in Sherwood Park—a community that always feels like a different world from Edmonton: cleaner, greener, less congested, and with noticeably more lawn signs supporting Pierre Poilievre and Danielle Smith.

Famous sits in a suburban strip mall featuring the gaudiest Smurf-blue Pizza 73 you’ll ever see, next to Westboro Elementary School.

Inside, the restaurant features bright yellow stucco-like walls trimmed in black, as though Jumpin’ Jim Brunzell and B. Brian Blair exploded. It’s clean, with seven black tables spaced far enough apart that the room never feels cramped. A few chairs have torn seats held together with tape. The décor is minimal: a 2020 award, a Molson Canadian mirror, an Oilers logo, and a front counter wrapped in words like donair, baklava, cheese curds, and Lebanese taouk in yellow and white lettering.

Behind the counter is an open kitchen with six spits—five beef, one chicken—and two employees assembling orders: a woman wearing a hijab and another wearing the type of headwrap I first noticed when Erykah Badu dropped Baduizm. The latter seemed friendly and, for the first time in my donair travels, my meal was brought directly to the table, on a white plate, wrapped in foil and tucked inside a plastic bag.

The donair was hefty—pudgier than what I’m used to—and packed with so much meat, it felt heavier than my daughter when she was born. Melted white cheese had fused with the warm pita, while the layers of beef pushed against it from within, stretching the donair at the seams and announcing its arrival the moment I peeled back the foil.

The sweet sauce coated the meat without drowning it. There wasn’t a puddle left behind, just enough moisture to complement the thin, long, uniformly sliced beef and the fresh vegetables.

The meat dominated everything else, overshadowing its supporting cast like Steve Urkel on Family Matters. By the second half, the iceberg lettuce, bright banana peppers, thick tomato slices, and dill pickles had disappeared, leaving a showcase of beef, cheese, sauce, and pita—and some of the meatiest bites I’ve had on this journey.

It’s an excellent donair—and at just $11.75, a steal.

But here’s the thing.

I recognized the meat immediately.

It tasted like Athena. I asked one of the employees, who confirmed that it was.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Athena meat. It’s good. I’ve enjoyed it at Swiss, Firezone, Maina’s, and now Famous.

But this is where my argument comes in.

How can you claim to make the city’s best donair when the centrepiece of your product isn’t your own creation? You can make a terrific sweet sauce. You can assemble it beautifully. You can grow fresh vegetables and wrap them perfectly. But the foundation of the donair belongs to somebody else.

To me, the greatest donair shops should offer something uniquely their own, starting with the meat itself.

Otherwise, too many places become interchangeable—pod people donairs with different signs out front. It’s the culinary equivalent of Diddy building hits around classic samples. The songs can still be great, but the artistry doesn’t move me the same way as someone who wrote the melody from scratch.

I fell in love with the place in 2011, right after a DJ Shadow gig. My wife and I walked in and ordered two white styrofoam boxes heavier than newborns: fries, gravy, shredded mozzarella, and donair meat packed to the brim.

A few years later, Mike’s Famous entered my life again after a screening of House Party at the Garneau Theatre for Boom Bap Cinema, my hip hop film series. It’s one of my favourite movies ever, and hardly anyone showed up. That crushed me.

Afterward, I dragged myself to the Black Dog for a pathetic excuse of an after-party with three friends: Anthony, Allan, and Jaspreet. I drank PBRs and pretended I was okay.

Eventually, I stumbled into Mike’s Famous and ordered a tater tot donair poutine—simultaneously one of the most disgusting and beautiful things I’ve ever eaten. Debauchery in a box.

I stood on the sidewalk eating it while, a few feet away, two cops attended to a drunk middle-aged white guy in a black-and-gold Ed Hardy shirt who’d been knocked out cold, Mike Tyson-style.

For years, that was my relationship with Mike’s Famous: me, under the influence, inhaling donair meat and fries by the pound.

Yesterday, I finally went there sober.

For the first time, I actually paid attention to the interior. It’s massive for a donair shop—like a long food court. Porcelain tile floors. Giant photos of coffee beans and pomegranates on the walls. Two counters: one for donairs, burgers, and poutines, the other devoted to gelato. Fourteen flavours behind curved glass, with the green mint and mango glowing.

Above the black leather booths, giant TVs played coverage for Game 2 between the Minnesota Wild and Colorado Avalanche—a reminder that the Oilers failed to make the second round.

My donair took about ten minutes to make and arrived looking more like a lettuce wrap than a donair.

There was so much greenery, the meat barely appeared until the final few bites, when the shredded lettuce collapsed onto the orange tray, making it look like the jungle from Apocalypse Now.

The meat is shaved paper-thin. I prefer thicker cuts, something you can actually sink your teeth into. Even when I finally got a proper mouthful near the end, the meat itself was bland, under-spiced, and desperate for more sweet sauce.

The pita had potential—thin, soft, not too doughy—but the donair never found balance. The meat-to-lettuce ratio was completely deranged.

When I finish a donair, I want my hands drenched in sweet sauce, like I’m 15 again and just discovered masturbation. Instead, I got wet lettuce clinging to my fingers like leeches. Gross.

You ever revisit a movie you loved as a kid and realize it doesn’t hold up (The Golden Child comes to mind)? That’s Mike’s Famous.

Drunk, it feels transcendent. Sober, it’s painfully average.

I want to be. I say this as a Punjabi man. The donair isn’t ours the way Butter Chicken and Dal Makhani are, but we’ve embraced Edmonton’s donair culture and done big things with it. PrimeTime—probably the most recognizable donair name in the city—is Punjabi-owned, and there are over twenty locations now.

I know Columbus is run by Punjabis because there’s artwork depicting the ten Sikh gurus and the Golden Temple behind the front counter… a few footsteps away from a cigarette ad and a contest entry box for a limousine ride to Shade—a strip club downtown.

I’m agnostic, but I was born into the Sikh religion, and Sikhism doesn’t exactly encourage smoking cigarettes and staring at strippers. Then again, I shouldn’t talk.

I smoked Benson & Hedges in high school because I thought it made me look cool, and I went to Diamonds—a strip club on Calgary Trail that no longer exists—a few times in my younger years, including right after my high school grad. I was still seventeen, but I used my acquaintance Rahul’s ID. He used the same ID himself a few minutes later and the white bouncer didn’t notice. A lot of white people think we all look the same. The other-race effect.

So no, I’m not religious—but I do have enough decency to keep my Guru portraits in a separate room from my biographies on Linda Lovelace and Ron Jeremy. Unlike Columbus, which has an image of Guru Har Krishan Ji—a seven-year-old guru—across from a contest box for strippers.

Religious contradictions aside, the place is filthy.

The floor looked like it hadn’t been mopped in weeks, the walls were stained, spray foam was crawling out of the ceiling tiles, and the washroom smelled like incense mixed with a neglected attic. A fossilized urine stain ran down the toilet tank, and somehow pubes had migrated from the toilet to the sink. Maybe it’s a seasonal thing, like geese in our stormwater pond.

And the donair is one of the worst I’ve had in twenty years of eating these things.

No lettuce—just onions and chunky tomatoes—and the dry, ancient-tasting pita was drowned in thick sweet sauce. The sauce swallowed the flaccid, barely seasoned meat, which was lukewarm and probably needed another few minutes on the spit—or maybe even a quick pan-fry.

I struggled through the sugary trainwreck on a park bench near the Thorncliff School playground—Columbus was too claustrophobic and dirty for me—while watching my daughter play.

She refused to eat Columbus’s chicken nuggets and threw one on the ground—they were so salty they bordered on inedible. Instead, she ran around with a recently immigrated Pakistani girl whose teachers had renamed her “Berry” because they couldn’t pronounce her actual name.

Within fifteen minutes, the kid had become my daughter’s big sister. She pushed her on swings, held her hand going down slides, and even hoisted her up onto the monkey bars.

It was beautiful to watch.

And honestly, it hurt a little too, because for fifteen minutes, my daughter got to experience something I’ve slowly had to accept I’ll probably never be able to give her: a sibling.

Meanwhile, Columbus’s sweet sauce soaked my face, splattered my jeans, and permanently stained my brown suede shoes.

I wasn’t allowed to have a girlfriend—I was 20, but I grew up in a conservative Punjabi household. I had two girlfriends in high school, but my parents never knew.

I had to lie to them about my movie date. I told them there was a psychology convention at the University of Alberta for potential graduate students.

So I got dressed up: blue Mexx shirt tucked into grey Mexx pants, black Aldo boots—just to go to Cinema City 12 to watch a graphic horror film and make out in an alley in Rideau Park beside a big blue dumpster. Two twenty-year-olds. Passionate. Raging hormones.

Between the film and the make-out session, we stopped for vanilla milkshakes at McDonald’s in Parsons Place on 34th Avenue, about five minutes from the theatre.

When I got home past my curfew, my parents ripped into me. Belittled me. Called me a failure. Compared me to other kids they thought were better.

But I was young, falling in love, and had just made out with my girlfriend. I didn’t care what they had to say.

It was an amazing night—even with my parents tearing me down.

But if I could go back in time—if I had a Doc Brown-modded DeLorean—I would’ve changed one thing: instead of vanilla milkshakes from McDonald’s, we should’ve walked across the parking lot and gotten donairs from Amean Pizza, Donair, and Sub.

I’m not sure if they even existed back then—but yeah, their donairs would’ve made that night even better.

Walking in there today, I felt a calm my anxiety-riddled mind rarely experiences.

I was close to home: Mill Woods. These 34th Avenue strip malls sit just outside it, but the influence of those 23 neighbourhoods is all over them. That’s why people call it Little India. It’s like the tentacles of Mill Woods.

I was also drawn in by the hole-in-the-wall charm: dated beige and olive green walls, the hum of a pop cooler and HVAC, images of the Kaaba, and a small TV above the counter playing verses from the Quran.

I’m not the most religious man—Darwin corrupted me in Biology 108—but I found the sounds soothing.

The gentleman at the counter wore a navy-and-grey polo and had the same spiked-up hairstyle as ’80s wrestler Rugged Ronnie Garvin. Grey at the temples, with a warm smile and kind eyes.

He spoke Urdu with his colleague—a beautiful-sounding language that made me suspect Pakistani or Indian ownership.

Using a Jason Voorhees-sized blade, he shaved generous chunks of donair meat off one of three spits, grilled them longer than usual for extra crispiness, then loosely packed the meat into a toasted, charred pita so it wouldn’t explode. He added a balanced amount of lettuce and tomato before drenching it all in sweet sauce and handing me three napkins—it needed four.

I noticed some orange in the sweet sauce—possibly blended with hot sauce—and there was mirch in the beef as well, leaving a gentle burn in my throat that lingered for a few hours. It was fantastic—and exactly what my spice-loving palate needs in a donair.

It felt like a religious experience for me: friendly service, Quran passages, and sweet sauce dripping down my hands.

But then a middle-aged Punjabi guy with an Anil Kapoor moustache walked in and shattered the tranquility by uttering the word “panchode” into his phone.

He was a Skip the Dishes driver.

It was their Oilers love. Blue and orange paint everywhere. Our colours. There’s even two Superfan Magoo stickers on the cash register.

Sitting there reminded me of the playoff runs the last two years—and how anticlimactic this season felt, losing to the Anaheim Ducks in the first round.

Yeah—I’m a hockey guy. Outside of Punjabi music, Bollywood, and beer, it’s the main thing my dad and I bond over. He got me into hockey and the Oilers in 1991, a year after they won their last Stanley Cup.

To support my new obsession, he bought me an Oilers jogging suit from Mill Woods Town Centre with the printed signatures of every player on it. I used to stare at and touch Joe Murphy’s autograph all the time—he was my favourite player. I wore that thing proudly—even while sobbing my five-year-old eyes out after the Minnesota North Stars swept the Oilers that year.

As a fan, there have been highs: Todd Marchant eliminating the Dallas Stars in 1997, the Oilers beating the Flames in five games in 2022, and surviving that grueling seven-game war against the Canucks in 2024.

But the losses linger longer.

Losing to Carolina in 2006 after battling back to tie the series without Dwayne Roloson. Blowing a comfortable lead by allowing three goals in 3 minutes and 16 seconds against Anaheim at the end of Game 5 in 2017.

That Anaheim loss hit me so hard that the next night I hosted a CJSR radio show called Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness—named after the Smashing Pumpkins album—filled with sad Punjabi songs about doomed romance and death.

And then—2024: the Oilers clawing back from a 3–0 series deficit only to lose Game 7, with Connor McDavid sitting devastated in the locker room afterward.

Being inside Donair Bros made me think about everything—and how I’ve never actually seen the Oilers win a Stanley Cup.

And how right now… I think the window might be closed.

Maybe I’ll never see this city win another one in my lifetime. I know it’s just professional sports—and these guys are millionaires—but I love this city: the make-out alley in Rideau Park, the tall 80s homes in Bearspaw, the smell of fenugreek drifting through Laurel. I never left. And I just want one more parade down Jasper Avenue.

But I can’t hold my Oilers grief against Donair Bros.

Located in Terwillegar Heights, it’s a small restaurant—five tables total, capacity maybe sixteen—and it feels modern and clean inside, though not without flaws. I hate how the wooden slats by the front counter obscure the veggie options—and the rotating spits of donair meat, one of the most important parts of the donair experience.

It’s owned by three brothers: the Talianis. All bearded. Same tapered haircut. United. Not feuding and estranged like The Darjeeling Limited.

And they make a really good donair.

The meat is shaved extra thin, almost like deli meat: soft, lightly spiced, tightly packed into a skinny pita, smothered with cheese on the inside, loaded with tomato, lettuce, and a creamy mayo-esque sweet sauce that soaks everything near the bottom—where there’s way too much lettuce—creating an Amazonian rainforest by the final bites. I half expected an anaconda to crawl out with Ice Cube, Jennifer Lopez, and Jon Voight.

Still, until the messy finale, it was genuinely good: meaty, juicy, saucy, and full of antioxidants in the form of vegetables.

I washed it down with a Zero Sugar Dr. Pepper—which I was happy to find in Donair Bros’ drink cooler alongside Zero Sugar Mug Root Beer—because all this sweet sauce is making me break out like a horny teenager at Ellerslie Junior High all over again.

I’ve only really celebrated my birthday three times. My parents threw parties for me when I was little, but they were not pleasant experiences: cousins blowing out my candles, hogging my toys, wrecking my computer.

And I never celebrated my birthday in my 20s because I didn’t have many friends. I was a loner. I just didn’t fit in. While everybody else was listening to 50 Cent and RDB, I was discovering Alice Cooper—not exactly the biggest name in my Punjabi circle.

Then, in my late 20s, I started hosting a bhangra program on campus radio and working at the Garneau Theatre.

That’s when I met my like-minded people: film geeks, music nerds, the weirdos.

And by 33, I felt I was ready to throw my first real birthday party at my parents’ house in Crawford Plains.

It was a huge success. Lots of people showed up. We got an Alley Kat keg, and I ended up vomiting that night (after everyone left, luckily), not before cheating in Taboo (there’s no rule against saying the words in Punjabi), and offending the stragglers with Iron Sheik interviews.

A year later, I threw another birthday party. Another success.

Then the pandemic happened, and I lost one of my closest friends to cancer.

I didn’t feel like celebrating anymore. Still, 40 was right around the corner. A milestone. I felt that I should do something.

I got an idea: a costume party. At my new house in the Grange.

But not just any costume party—an 80s costume party.

I grew up on 80s movies. Crocodile Dundee, Twins, Batman. I always had a love for that decade.

But when I was in Grade 12, a PS2 game amplified that love—Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Set in 1986, the game’s soundtrack became my life’s soundtrack. I discovered so much music through it: Hall & Oates, A Flock of Seagulls, Wang Chung, Kim Wilde.

It led me to dig deeper and discover the 80s movies I missed in childhood: Better Off Dead, Three O’Clock High, Chopping Mall.

I became obsessed with the decade and its pop culture. So I decided to honour it with the ultimate 80s party for my 40th, which I dubbed Ramneek’s 80s Rewind.

Costumes were mandatory.

My friends showed up dressed like Prince, Mookie from Do the Right Thing, Eddie Van Halen, three Marty McFlys, King Jaffe Joffer, the Grady Twins, Pee-wee Herman, Large Marge, and Tiffany.

I dressed up as Detroit’s own Axel Foley.

All the music was 80s. No anachronisms.

We played Cyndi Lauper, Pet Shop Boys, Neneh Cherry, Madonna, Peter Gabriel, and even Hulk Hogan’s entrance song.

Then came the mandatory bhangra cipher, which saw all the desis dance like it was 1989 in an unfinished Mill Woods basement. Heera, Premi, and Johnny Zee were resurrected—for one night only.

We even formed a conga line to Chirag Pehchan’s classic “Rail Gaddi.”

Later, my three-year-old daughter—dressed as Princess Peach—and I shared a dance to Raffi’s “Baby Beluga.”

It was exactly what my 40-year-old soul needed.

And for dinner, I ordered 20 pizzas from Firezone Pizza & Donair.

My friends loved it.

But I messed up and only ordered two donair pies because donair pizza is often hit or miss. The only one I’ve really loved in the past decade was a now-retired pie from Campio—Deep State Deluxe or something like that—but Firezone makes a good one, smothered with sweet sauce, and all the slices were gone within five minutes.

It was a mistake on my end, but I don’t think anybody minded.

We still had a blast. Pizza. Booze. 80s music.

We even had 80s props around the house. View-Masters. California Raisins. NES cartridges. Alaap cassettes. Thriller on vinyl. A WrestleMania V poster.

And Poltergeist was on the TV.

I really needed that night, because I was actually hurting inside.

Months earlier, I had left my parents’ home and abandoned the role of the good Indian son who stays with his parents in their old age. I wanted my own life. My own house. My independence. But leaving my parents broke hearts, including my own, and sat heavy on my conscience.

We weren’t talking at the time, and it was the first birthday without them. It crushed me.

I desperately needed the love of my friends that night—and I got it.

Maybe that’s why I’ve developed such a soft spot for Firezone. I connect it with something that meant so much to me.

Yesterday, after finishing the latest draft of my Butter Chicken Odyssey play, I went for a walk: Oilers hoodie, light blue Banana Republic jeans, headphones on, Drake’s Iceman playing while I basked in the warm weather.

The calm of the early spring evening. The greenery. The geese.

One of them squealed at me when I got too close and almost made me shit myself. For a second, the thing became demonic, ready to commit acts of terror.

I ended up at the Grange Centre, which is way better than the Hamptons market next to my house because it actually has mom-and-pop restaurants, including Classic Indian—my pick for the best butter chicken on the west end—and Firezone, my neighbourhood donair and pizza joint, the same place that kept my friends nourished and happy at my 40th birthday.

I walked in.

It’s generic and forgettable inside. Red-and-white walls—Calgary Flames colours clashing with Oilers stuff. There’s a poster of a younger Connor McDavid—before years of playoff heartbreak visibly aged him. There’s also an Oilers flag under the front counter, and above it: three TV screens with the menu, a sign advertising 2-for-1 pizza, and two Athena ads, meaning Firezone is one of the many local donair joints that relies on Athena rather than making the meat themselves.

The place was dead silent. No radio. The baseball game on the TV in the corner was muted.

The interaction with the server felt awkward. He was laconic. Reserved. I wasn’t greeted with a smile. I felt unwanted—like Jugal Hansraj in Masoom.

I ordered a beef donair with cheese. Lettuce. Tomatoes. Pickles. Sweet sauce.

No drink because I was penny-pinching and already had a Canada Dry on me. Still, I was tempted to rummage through their drink cooler; it had cans of Mountain Dew Code Red, a drink that brings back Taco Bell memories.

I couldn’t see how they shaved the meat because everything—including the spits—was hidden behind faux-wood paneling. But the beef cuts were thick, and they packed it into a fluffy, grilled Lebanese-style pita with so many vegetables that it seemed ready to implode.

Seriously, the lettuce looked like it was trying to crawl out—like spiders in Arachnophobia.

And while eating it, I immediately recognized the meat.

If you’re a donair enthusiast, you know Sam Tawachi and Athena’s product. It’s legendary in Edmonton, but even with its 28 herbs and spices, it still lacks the heat my Mill Woods Punjabi palate craves.

You’ll find it at places like Swiss, but what makes Firezone stand above Swiss is value. For just 95 cents more than a regular beef donair with cheese at Swiss, Firezone packs theirs with more meat and way more vegetables.

The extra ingredients demand more sweet sauce, but Firezone doesn’t go overboard. It doesn’t soak your face and jeans.

Still, at times, the balance isn’t always there. Some bites are all greenery—lettuce so wet it tastes freshly washed—making you feel like you’re eating a Subway sub wrapped in a pita. I’m glad I ordered pickles, because the acidity cuts through the wet lettuce and saves those bites.

After the donair, I walked back home and stopped at a stormwater pond to enjoy my Canada Dry while watching geese swim across the water, safely from an observation deck.

Nearby, I could hear water running through a narrow creek, flowing over grey rocks and dead grass—far more peaceful than Drake’s latest album: an insecure, bitter, petty mess, but still compelling and bar-heavy.

As I absorbed the sounds of the creek and the surrounding geese, a mallard duck flew down into the water, its emerald green head glowing in the evening light.

I had to turn Drake off. His negativity was ruining the moment. So I played something else instead. The perfect song: the theme from Fred Penner’s Place.

I know Atom Egoyan portrayed it as a mystical gig in his movie The Adjuster—in which the titular adjuster even fornicates with policyholders while they wait for restoration crews to rebuild their homes.

In real life, property adjusting is not like that.

It’s often filled with solitude, driving to towns like Redwater—which has an enormous wooden statue of Raphael the Ninja Turtle—and Bashaw and not seeing a single coloured person on your travels.

Sometimes, I’d be so filled with dread during those drives—you were driving to isolated areas straight out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—that I’d listen to Brian Eno’s Ambient 1, an album designed to help with airport anxiety. That’s how messed up things were for me when I was a property adjuster.

It’s a tough gig: thankless, low-paying, extremely stressful—it’s at those jobs I started going grey and developing a Bela Lugosi hairline.

And I saw some shit: houses burned to the ground, tenants vandalizing properties, marking the walls with period blood and letting their dogs piss all over the place, frozen pipes bursting and destroying entire homes—and having to deny coverage because the house was vacant (the policyholder went on vacation for over a month during winter and had turned off the heat).

And people would often lie, making up things they never owned just so State Farm and Intact would cover it. I had this one person who was renting a property tell me he had 5,000 movies on DVD and 1,000 Xbox games. I knew the movie thing was a lie because he didn’t know what the Criterion Collection was; as for the Xbox games, I got his gamer ID and found out the only games he ever played were GTA IV and Gears of War—the game that came with the console when I purchased an Xbox 360.

And when I refused to pay for all these movies and games, he screamed at me from across a table, gesticulating with such force that it lifted his shirt, exposing a belly button encircled by a flame tattoo.

I couldn’t even take holidays and travel while working this property adjuster gig because you couldn’t take a proper break. You were supposed to be working all the time, always available. I went to Victoria and New York, trying to have a modicum of joy in my prime. Meanwhile, these homeowners would still call me, knowing I was on vacation, screaming at my voicemail to give them money to cover random things like hair dye, thongs, and new engineered wood floors they never had in the first place—and reporting me to management. Questioning my character. My morality. Treating me like garbage.

I remember one day, feeling especially dejected after another nasty shift at Intact, when I stopped at High Voltage on the drive home from downtown and ordered a donair.

In operation since 1997, under the ownership of Taso—a curmudgeonly Greek proprietor with a reputation for barking at employees and customers alike—High Voltage is a boring-looking joint: minimal decor, red and yellow walls, a brownish tile floor, six or seven round-top tables for dining in, a tall drink cooler full of Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Grape Crush, and Sunny D.

There’s nothing that screams unique about High Voltage at first glance, but it’s probably the most interesting donair joint in Edmonton—because it’s not your typical local donair joint. It’s never open late, it’s Greek-owned, and has an extremely adventurous menu: you can get blue cheese, jerk sauce, and pizza sauce on your donair. You can even add salami, ham, and pepperoni, the kind of stuff you’d never find in our local Lebanese-owned halal joints, because that stuff’s a sin.

I always liked the place. I remember being excited to have my donair at home that day, after my grueling Intact shift.

When I got into the company SUV, donair in hand, I accidentally backed into a telephone pole in the claustrophobic parking lot. The impact shook me so hard that I bit my tongue.

I was so frustrated by what I did—my stupidity, the vehicle damage I likely caused—and the fact that I already hated my job at Intact and my life that I broke down and sobbed like a child.

When I got out of the car, I expected the worst and was terrified of telling my supervisor: she was intimidating, always wore black like she was at a funeral, and looked like the third member of the WWF tag team The Natural Disasters.

But I saw no damage.

Relieved, I got back into my SUV, wiped my tears away, and demolished my donair in the parking lot. I didn’t wait to get home, because I needed something to remind me of the good things in life.

That donair was my therapy—it reminded me that, sure, my life sucks right now, but at least I’m alive and can enjoy a donair.

That donair was High Voltage’s Super Hog: donair meat, Montreal-style smoked meat, Calabrese salami.

I know this isn’t a standard donair—but ordering a standard one from High Voltage is stupid. It’s like asking for missionary when you’re dating a porn star—it’s the most boring option. You have to go big and wild when you’re at High Voltage.

The whole-wheat pita, from Byblos Bakery, wrapped in terracotta butcher paper, grill-pressed like a panini, crisped, dusted with sea salt, black pepper, oregano, and brushed with olive oil. Inside: mozzarella, tomatoes, pickles, jalapeños, romaine lettuce (it gets soggy and slimy like the lettuce in a Wendy’s Junior Bacon Cheeseburger), 3 Alarm Sauce (jerk sauce, hot buffalo sauce, and extra cayenne pepper), and the three above-mentioned meats, intertwined like a ménage à trois with the chemistry of a lifelong monogamous bond.

The donair meat stood tallest: enormous strips, glistening and longer than Scottie Pippen’s arms, complemented by large, juicy, flesh-coloured slices of Montreal smoked meat and countless slices of Calabrese salami. The salami amplified the mahogany-coloured 3 Alarm Sauce, making my nose run like Donovan Bailey.

There was no sweet sauce, but I didn’t miss it because the 3 Alarm doesn’t need a sugary counterpart and caters to the spice fiend in me. It pools at the bottom of the pita, staining it and turning the last few bites into a spicy, sprawling mess.

It’s a donair unlike any other local donair. A bizarre one, featuring forbidden pork flesh. Something straight out of a stoner’s munchies-fueled wet dream.

Truly fantastic and emblematic of High Voltage’s reputation as one of Edmonton’s best donair joints—even though it doesn’t feel like a real donair joint. It doesn’t pigeonhole itself like that and offers so much more: gyros, deli sandwiches, bison wraps, coffee. But I keep coming back to the Super Hog.

It was there for me when I crashed Intact Insurance’s SUV into a telephone pole and cried—and it’s still there for me today, almost 41 years old, far more content in life, but still suffering from existential despair.

Haligonians don’t really like cheese. They like to keep things conservative with tomatoes, onions, and sweet sauce. That’s too basic for me.

I need lettuce, banana peppers, pickles, and cheese. Haligonians would say this isn’t a traditional donair, but what’s a traditional donair—and who determines that?

When Greek immigrant Peter Gamoulakos first introduced the gyro to Halifax in the early 1970s, it was lamb and tzatziki. Canadians didn’t respond particularly well to it, so he shifted to beef and created what we now call sweet sauce, giving birth to the donair and catering to the still-developing palate of a pre-Multiculturalism Act Canada.

So this thing we call traditional is essentially a bastardization—and the extremism some Haligonians display regarding the ingredients of a donair is on par with narrow-minded religious fundamentalism.

And it cost me my cheese on Monday.

For a second, I forgot I had to specify “with cheese.” Standard donairs don’t come with it—and it’s Halifax’s fault.

But it’s okay. Magma still makes a good donair sans cheese, and it’s representing my beloved Mill Woods to the fullest by slinging high-quality donairs, burgers, and subs in the Meyokumin Retail Centre—something that developed in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

It used to be all greenery, and I remember roaming the surrounding streets as a kid.

Across from Magma, at Mill Woods Town Centre, is where I bought my first CDs—Scarface’s The Untouchable, DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, and Big Pun’s Capital Punishment—from HMV, $17.99 per disc.

The Lacasa Furniture store across the street used to be a Blockbuster. It’s where I rented Halloween 4 in the summer of 1995. I still remember my parents fighting that day over my dad’s alcohol problem. He’d drink on weekends while my mom was working her cooking gig, so I often felt neglected and needed movies as companions.

Mom would force him to drive me to Blockbuster. I’d rent movies and watch them over and over again while Dad was drinking and watching Vision TV’s Des Pardes and the latest music videos from Folk ’n’ Funky, a new album from a young upstart named Jazzy B. Dad would criticize his hip hop-inspired appearance and ridiculous hairstyle while simultaneously acknowledging the power and greatness of his voice.

Yeah—Meyokumin is home. Millhurst is home. And Magma is a great addition to home.

It opened during the COVID pandemic and has survived in a cursed location ever since. No business survives there. Previous tenants include Komodo Kebab and La Taste Buds Indian Cuisine.

But Magma survives.

It operates out of a clean, spacious spot with white walls, dark wood wainscoting, and four-panel light boxes suspended from a black ceiling. The decor includes framed lava photos—a nod to the Magma name—as well as baby Oilers and Team Canada jerseys.

And it serves a solid donair: medium-thick, well-spiced cuts of soft beef packed tightly and generously into a fluffy steamed pita, mixed with banana peppers, pickles, and tomatoes beneath a thin layer of lettuce. Everything in its right place, with meat front and center in every bite.

I never actually saw the meat being shaved from the spit, and that sucks. I enjoy watching a Hanzo-type blade do its thing, shaving beef from a rotating tower. But both spits were empty, making me wonder if the meat had been pre-sliced and was simply being reheated on the flat top.

At the end of my donair, things were surprisingly clean. Only a small pool of sweet sauce remained, along with maybe one rogue piece of lettuce and a banana pepper. I think I would’ve preferred a little more sauce to coat the meat and make it sweeter, but there were no wasted ingredients. No structural implosion. And the sog at the bottom was minimal.

It’s a near-perfect composition, courtesy of Magma’s Lebanese owner, who seems stoic at first but is kind and respectful. He even gave my daughter four peppermint candies.

He’s also pretty religious. There’s a crucifix attached to a bookshelf above the front counter that contains religious pamphlets and a Bible.

That type of stuff doesn’t bother me. Death is scary—and religion can provide comfort. My favourite U of A professor, Jamie Dyce, used to have crucifixes in his psychology lecture slides. He was also teaching at Concordia University at the time—a Christian university—so I always assumed some of those slides were recycled from there.

The religious imagery at Magma reminded me of something funny.

When I first reviewed them years ago, they told me they appreciated the review but asked if I could tone down the profanity and bawdiness because it conflicted with their religious beliefs.

I sort of stopped going after that. Not because I was offended—I wasn’t. They were friendly with their request. But, in my mind, George Carlin was right: there are no bad words—only bad thoughts and bad intentions. And I’ve never been a big fan of prudishness.

On a side note, I think it’s amusing that Magma’s drink cooler contains Strawberry Fanta branded with Ethan Hawke’s The Grabber—a child killer from The Black Phone movie series who returns from hell to haunt the dreams of children in the sequel.

I wonder if that conflicts with their beliefs.

Still, no grudges.

We see the world differently. That doesn’t mean they don’t make a fine donair—and Magma definitely makes a fine donair. One of the best in Mill Woods.

Usually, the day before my birthday, I’m pensive. Sad. Thinking about childhood, adolescence, the passage of time, how little of it we get, and my mortality. I’m morbid like that. My nani was death-obsessed, and my mom once told me a birthday isn’t something to celebrate in the nightclubs—it’s just another year closer to death.

But I’ve tried to be more optimistic. A day above ground is a good day—and I made it to 41.

I was thinking of taking today and tomorrow off work, finally watching that Michael Jackson movie at the Scotiabank Theatre, and possibly enjoying a donair at one of the more recommended spots: Famous, Richard’s, or Eddie’s.

Instead, I’m writing this from the toilet.

I think Donair Station gave me a temporary aversion to donairs last night.

After placing my order, the two employees—passionless and Lance Storm-serious, seemingly unfamiliar with the concept of smiling—looked at each other awkwardly, as though surprised to see a customer. They muttered something to one another before one of them opened a steel container and dropped a frugal amount of thin, pathetic-looking greyish donair strips onto the flat top.

Meanwhile, behind them, untouched spits slowly rotated with forlorn cones of meat.

I would’ve preferred they pulled out the blade, carved fresh beef from the spit, then cooked it again for extra crispiness. Hell, I’d even have been okay with them just shaving it off the spit and serving it. But after the E. coli outbreak linked to donairs in 2006, Edmonton shops are legally required to cook the meat twice for safety.

I don’t think I’m suffering from E. coli or anything serious—but my lower left abdomen hurts and my chittarhole is producing farts louder than Apna Sangeet’s dhol. It’s not a good feeling.

The usual birthday existential crisis has now been joined by a diarrhea crisis.

And I wanted to like Donair Station.

It’s tucked away near the Terra Losa park. A pleasant spring breeze drifted through the restaurant. Two televisions played baseball. The commentary mixed with the hum of the drink cooler.

Behind that cooler sits an excellent drink selection: the standard Coke products, but also Stewart’s, Jones, and Jarritos. They’ve got cookies from Big Daddy and a curved glass display filled with cakes and pies.

The dining room itself is long and comfortable, featuring a black tufted banquette running the length of one wall, brown tables, and burgundy leatherette chairs.

They’ve been operating since 1999—and I expected a good donair.

Instead, they served a truly awful one.

The beef tasted geriatric and rubbery—and carried the odour of expired deli meat. There wasn’t much of it, either. The vegetables overwhelmed everything. Giant sheets of wet lettuce swallowed the meat. The long pickle slices were slimy and sticky like semen hands.

And all of it was soaked from above with sweet sauce. Rather than distributing it throughout the donair, they shot a virile load onto the top, creating one of the worst opening bites I’ve ever had. Hardened pita saturated with sweet sauce that tasted less like sweet sauce and more like a bad ranch dressing.

Online, when people criticize Donair Station, the restaurant sometimes responds with heated rebuttals, asking why customers finished the food and accusing them of messing up the washroom.

Well, I finished the food because my father taught me that wasting meat is a sin.

And I didn’t destroy Donair Station’s washroom.

I destroyed my own instead.

I taste-tested the latter for a house party I was throwing a week later and they failed miserably—they made terrible pizza: uncooked cheese, soggy veggies, and dough harder than my Astronomy 122 final exam.

The only redeeming thing about Tastii was that they had WrestleFest: my favourite arcade game from childhood.

Before my birthday parties in the early 90s, my dad would always buy Crown Royal, Black Label, and Labatt Blue from the government-owned liquor store in Millbourne Mall. He knew I’d get bored waiting around, so he’d give me coins for the arcade—and I’d always play WrestleFest.

I was good, but never knew how to pin opponents. Once I faced this older white dude—handsome, could’ve passed for a New Kid on the Block. I destroyed him with Earthquake, hit him with two finishers—he was playing as the Big Boss Man—and I kept asking him how to pin.

The bastard wouldn’t tell me.

Then he beat me.

I sulked a little, but Dad came back with his bag of booze and took me to Dairy Queen for burgers, which made me happy—I was a fat fast-food kid and forever remain one.

WrestleFest nostalgia aside, Tastii still made an awful pizza, and I’m not surprised to see them replaced by Eddie’s.

It’s in the Westgate Plaza, next to a halal meat shop, a Rexall drugstore, a Medicentre, and Eddie’s Barbershop (I wonder if the donair-maker doubles as a barber, like Brutus Beefcake doubled as a barber and wrestler).

The plaza faces modest 1950s bungalows, many now being demolished and replaced by those ugly box-like infill duplexes and triplexes that tower over the remaining original homes, block their sunlight, and completely ruin the look of an established neighbourhood.

Inside Eddie’s, it still looks much like Tastii did: bright and clean, with black tables and chairs, a tall drink cooler stocked with the usual suspects (Pepsi, Coke, 7UP), four screens displaying the menu, and another large TV showing some travel program. I wish it had been showing the NBA Finals instead.

I haven’t followed basketball closely since 2004, but I want the Knicks to win because I want die-hard Knicks fan Spike Lee to be happy. He’s one of my heroes. His films shaped me as a young adult. They taught me about race relations, navigating your marginalized status, turning it into a strength, and fighting the power.

On a much less important note, Eddie’s is a party pooper and got rid of WrestleFest, so I couldn’t enjoy a game… and I even brought quarters to play. In its place now: the trash and recycle.

All three spits were naked and still.

There was a frying pan with a K2-sized mountain of pre-sliced meat—short, thick chunks, some of them leaning over the edge.

The server—who resembled Taylor Negron, but with glasses, a Lebanese accent, and a surlier disposition—fried a hefty amount on the flat top and packed it into a soft, slightly toasted pita. A tight foil cover job helped it hold everything together, resulting in only minor spillage.

The melted cheese had fully assimilated. The lettuce was slightly wilted—and for a second I understood why Haligonians hate it—but the rest of the veggies—tomatoes, banana peppers, and pickles—were fresh and gave the donair an acidic jolt.

The thing was absolutely loaded with beef and surprisingly filling—usually a regular-sized donair leaves me hungry for more.

And it was Aladdin meat, which I like. It has more of a peppery kick than its major rival and pinches your throat after each swallow. A nice masochistic burn.

But it could’ve used more sweet sauce. Eddie’s version is smooth, not too runny and not too goopy. There just wasn’t enough of it. A lot of the bites tasted almost entirely of meat, making you feel like a caveman on a carnivorous tear and resulting in some meat sweats in my wife’s Toyota.

Although I was content eating my donair in the car, I saved half of it for home so I could watch the Knicks mount the most miraculous comeback, erasing a 29-point deficit against the Spurs.

Like I said, I’m no longer invested in basketball. I was heavily invested when the Knicks lost to the Rockets in ’94 and when they lost to the Spurs in 2000, but now I just don’t really care too much. I’m mostly a hockey guy in my 40s.

Still, it was so nice to see Spike Lee—covered in blue and orange, like always—celebrating like he just won an Oscar for BlacKkKlansman. He’s exactly my dad’s age and was like a surrogate pop culture father to me.

And he gave us classics: Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, Clockers, Bamboozled, and more. He deserves all the happiness in his golden years.

And I’m here for it—donair in hand.

They were often snooty, born with a silver spoon, and usually didn’t know how to speak Punjabi. Their parents had integrated decades ago. Some of them had even drifted away from the mother tongue and Punjabi culture, and they looked down on Mill Woods.

And Riverbend got away with things we couldn’t get away with. They were hit by drive-by shootings, but their reputation was never tarnished the way Mill Woods’s was. Because Mill Woods was browner, more blue collar, and home to less-established immigrant families.

The Riverbend kids didn’t struggle like we did. Their parents were educated, established, and often well-off. Those kids weren’t getting beaten after every mistake because their parents understood the concept of negative punishment. Our parents just knew the wooden spoon. The Riverbend kids had palatial two-storey homes with fully developed basements. I was raised in a bilevel with an unfinished basement and the smallest bedroom.

There was a cultural and financial divide between us and them, and I experienced it firsthand in the IB program at Harry Ainlay. They were the Socs to our Greasers. They had physicians and dentists for parents; my father bent steel for a living. And that’s not a shot at my dad—but we were coming of age in the shiny suit era of hip hop, when everything was materialistic. They had German cars, Sega Dreamcasts, rec rooms in the basement, and other things I didn’t. I despised them for that.

I don’t carry the same disdain or jealousy these days, but I still detect a touch of smugness in Riverbend. There are realtors who specialize in Riverbend properties—Riverbend Rickys who know neighbourhoods like Rhatigan Ridge, Bulyea Heights, and Brander Gardens inside out. But you’ll never find a Mill Woods Malkit specializing in Satoo, Ekota, and Menisa.

I was afraid my old feelings would be reawakened when I visited Olympus Donair, the one recommendation I received from Riverbend.

I expected a white-tiled, spotless operation surrounded by luxurious homes.

Instead, I found a modest shop tucked into an aging strip mall surrounded by low-rise apartments—a far cry from the Riverbend I expected. It felt working class, much like Mill Woods.

I didn’t feel out of place—or inferior.

Inside, things were plain. The ceiling was mostly black with some orange. Stock images of burgers, chicken fingers, and fries hung on the walls. A Canadian flag. Gold-framed Arabic calligraphy. Two black banquettes with brown tables and black chairs. A Samsung TV in the corner played FIFA while the Quran echoed through the speakers, creating a tranquil vibe.

While I ordered my donair, a beam of afternoon sunlight cut through the large windows and landed on my four-year-old daughter, making her look like a farishta. For a moment, I nearly got teary-eyed.

I bought her a bottle of Minute Maid orange juice, which the server, Mohammed, shook before handing it to me. It was hard to decide on a drink because they had a solid selection, including Dr Pepper, A&W Root Beer, Gatorade, and SunRype juice boxes.

Mohammed, a bearded Syrian-Canadian in his twenties, has owned Olympus with his family for 13 years. He showed none of the now-stereotypical surliness I’ve come to expect from donair shops. There was a warmth to his voice, as if he understood the value of being kind to the customers who support his family’s business. He answered all my questions and let me be as inquisitive as I wanted.

The beef comes from Aladdin. The chicken is homemade. The pita comes from the Mediterranean Pita Bakery in Glengarry—Mohammed even showed me the branding on the bag. Nobody has been that transparent with me, so far.

He used an electric slicer on the spit—which I’m not a fan of because it produces such uniform cuts. I prefer a machete-like blade, which usually gives you a mix of thick and thin slices that makes each bite a little different. The meat at Olympus was shaved pretty thin, slightly spicy, and tasted almost identical—albeit a bit warmer—to the Aladdin beef I had at Eddie’s Donair & Pizza.

I was distracted by my daughter for a minute or two and didn’t notice whether Mohammed cooked the meat a second time on the flat top, but I detected no char or crispness.

He wrapped the beef with mozzarella, tomatoes, pickles, banana peppers, and sweet sauce inside the lightly toasted pita. The donair was packed snugly in foil, with a small plastic bag underneath to catch excess sauce, then placed inside a paper bag with three napkins.

The vegetables all held their composure. Nothing was wet or wilted, and everything was evenly distributed. Mohammed seemed to understand that the veggies were supporting characters, allowing the beef to remain the protagonist. The bottom of the pita eventually turned orange from the sweet sauce and banana peppers, but it never became soggy, and every bite remained fantastic—the creamy sauce was present throughout, coating the meat.

Although the vegetables played their supporting roles well, the mozzarella refused to stay in the background. It attached itself to nearly every bite and occasionally overpowered the donair like Diddy ad-libs on a Biggie song—but in a good way. I really like cheesy donairs.

After finishing, I was tempted to buy some Sour Patch Kids from Mohammed—Olympus sells Sour Patch Kids in four flavours, including grape and strawberry—and munch on them with my daughter while wandering around Brander Gardens to get a better feel for the Riverbend I once envied, despised, and avoided.

But my four-year-old had other plans and insisted we head home to use the potty.

Like me, she doesn’t like public washrooms.

Back then, they served me freezer-burned fries, ruining a poutine, but the service was okay: the employee called me “brother.”

Today, they gave me a terrible donair, and the service was curt, though I suspect that may have been the result of a language barrier.

I think the restaurant was Lebanese-owned back in the day, though somebody once told me the owners were actually Jordanian. It’s now Nepalese-owned, with new menu items including Indo-Chinese dishes like chilli chicken, paneer momos, and Schezwan chilli wings.

Although the new owners have expanded the menu to reflect their cuisine, they don’t seem to care much for the restaurant’s appearance. I don’t mind a run-down place, but this goes slightly beyond that.

The paint job is sloppy, with gaudy red paint bleeding onto areas it shouldn’t, including the washroom mirror trim. A taped-up cup holder covers the washroom light switch. The ceiling has water stains, and the acoustic tiles are blackened with grime.

The donair spits sit empty, surrounded by heavily burned foil, while a pile of Aladdin meat rests in a black pot waiting to be thrown onto the grill. Two tiny Samsung TVs offer little entertainment: one cycles through photos of the food, while the other sits on a home screen with options like YouTube and Disney+. A large canvas print of gondolas drifting through Venetian waters hangs on the wall—maybe to complement the pasta they have on the menu?

I skipped the sweet sauce this time around because that stuff’s been giving me acne breakouts, making me look like that guy from the old ’90s commercial who complained, “People don’t see the real me; they just see my acne problem.” So I opted for the spicy garlic sauce. A lamentable decision.

The heat seemed to come from a Buffalo-style sauce. It was garlicky, but in an unpleasant way—and tasted like the bastard child of Miracle Whip and Frank’s RedHot. It overwhelmed the meat, which already tasted old and was served on the colder side—thinly sliced, browned at some point, but not recently. The sauce lingered in my mouth for at least an hour, coating my teeth, numbing my lips, and leaving behind the kind of foul aftertaste you get after dental work when your mouth is full of fluoride.

The wrap job was garbage. They used a Mediterranean Pita Bakery pita and insulted it with incompetence: big, chunky, pointy pieces of iceberg lettuce, thick, soggy tomato wedges, barely any cheese, and so much moisture that everything collapsed toward the end like Drew Barrymore’s guts in Scream.

It was an ugly mess—and it wasn’t good-looking to begin with. Light orange sauce streaked the cold pita, while a piece of tomato and a chunk of lettuce protruded from the wrap like antennae.

There’s no donair love here. Maybe the Indo-Chinese menu is where they shine, but the donair side of the business seems to be an afterthought. This is no dream; it’s a nightmare—and one I hope never to experience again. I’d rather run into Freddy Krueger in my dreams than this donair.

They’re currently in the University Hospital, on the fifth floor—palliative care. The floor has a distinct smell I can’t quite describe. But I know it. I first encountered it at the Gerald Zetter Centre over a decade ago, when I used to volunteer as a porter, taking elderly patients to their daily physiotherapy sessions—it’s a smell I’ve come to associate with imminent death.

They’re in a small room: no TV, wall-mounted monitoring equipment, oxygen connections, and yellow walls bearing the words, “A happy home is filled with love and laughter.”

It’s depressing. A difficult place to spend your final days—but are there any good places to die? If I had to die today, I’d struggle to pick one. The places I love the most no longer exist: Royal Video in the Knottwood Plaza, where my mom and I rented horror movies to learn English, and Cinema City 12, where we watched what felt like every major Hollywood movie released in 1997.

But this room… it feels so indiscriminate, so soulless, so devoid of personality. Like death itself.

And yet, despite everything, this room is where they need to be.

To make the dying feel a little better, we give them a Werther’s Original—they like the taste, the sweetness, the caramel—and to put them at ease, we play classic Punjabi folk songs from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. We try Asa Singh Mastana. We try A.S. Kang. But it’s one artist that reaches them: Gurdas Maan, specifically his 1984 album Chakkar.

There isn’t much you can say to comfort the dying. You can remind them of old memories, tell them how much they matter to you, and—if you’re religious, which I’m not—you can talk about the great beyond and the paradise that awaits.

When I leave the hospital, I feel empty. Death always makes me feel empty. It’s the knowledge that we’re finite. Some people don’t want to live forever; I do, eternally youthful, watching all the latest horror movies and listening to all the new Bhangra albums—but that’s just not a possibility. And that breaks my heart.

I wasn’t ready to go home and brood, so I decided to get a donair—my antidepressant, my anti-anxiety medication, my brief reprieve.

That’s how I found myself at Simon King, a favourite of mine for two decades. It’s been in the same location since 1989, next to the Fishin’ Hole, and they still make their own meat—instead of relying on suppliers like Aladdin and Athena.

It’s large inside for a donair joint: space to breathe, 12 tables seating more than 40 people, a bright red-and-white colour scheme reminiscent of a retro ’50s diner, photos of Wayne Gretzky, two images of Tony Montana—one coked-up with rage, the other wounded and vengeful—and a black-and-white photograph of Muhammad Ali throwing a punch at George Foreman in Zaire.

I ordered the King Spicy—a specialty donair also available at Amean. The Lebanese owner of Simon King and his Libyan coworker told me Amean borrowed the idea from them—and they were allowed to do so because they were part of the same family.

The King Spicy’s a heavy, overstuffed, gloriously messy thing filled with long, thick strips of beef, some charred, coiling over one another like Bubble Tape. Surrounding the meat are fresh banana peppers, pickles, lettuce, tomatoes, melted mozzarella, and enough mirch to leave your tongue tingling, all wrapped in a toasted pita thin enough that the meat dominates every bite.

The pita spends the entire meal threatening to burst, but somehow keeps hanging on, leaking sweet sauce that runs down your hands—it even stained my black kurta pyjama. Eventually it gives up near the end, collapsing into a scoopable pile of chilli-flake-infused beef and vegetables. Fortunately, nothing turns soggy or unpleasant.

Edmonton has a lot of donairs, but only a few great ones—and Simon King’s is one of them. For a few minutes, it took my mind off death. I know those thoughts will return—I’ve lived with death anxiety since Grade 2. But there are still moments that remind me how good it feels to be alive: an old Punjabi song, a cherished memory, a Werther’s Original, a favourite donair, and the privilege of being here to experience all these things.

We celebrated her birthday and my sister-in-law’s birthday at 3 Amigos. I used to get my haircut at Fadi’s barbershop—he resembled Roberto Luongo. And the strip mall had one of Edmonton’s best video stores: Sneak Preview. It was a film geek’s paradise, where you could rent movies by Ozu, Bergman, and Godard.

I don’t spend much time in Duggan these days, but after a recent visit to my mother-in-law’s house, I found myself back in the neighbourhood and decided to try Pizza Unlimited’s donair.

Before ordering, I needed to empty my bladder. The washroom reeked. There was fresh, unflushed urine in the toilet. There was piss on the toilet seat and poop stains in the bowl.

Outside the washroom, there was garbage all over the ceramic-tiled floor: used cups, plastic forks, dirty napkins, receipts, fries, and donair meat. It was filthy.

One friendly young employee, wearing mismatched Crocs—one pink, the other beige—started sweeping, but another employee appeared to yell at him in Pashto, a language spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The young employee stopped cleaning, leaving the mess where it was for every customer to see.

The restaurant saw a lot of foot traffic while I was there—mostly immigrant families—and you could hear multiple languages coming from the kitchen, including Punjabi, Hindi, and the above-mentioned Pashto, suggesting a culturally diverse staff.

The décor was tacky. Bright orange walls, black-and-white checkerboard, and a black ceiling gave the place a Halloween-like appearance. The walls were covered in dust and grime. Cleanliness didn’t appear to be valued here.

Neither did fast service.

They took 30 minutes to make my donair—an unreasonable amount of time for a single donair. No one apologized for the delay. Nobody checked on me. Nobody cared. I think they forgot about me until I went up to the front counter and asked about my food. They made me wait another ten minutes. I just sat there hoping the food would justify the wait.

It didn’t.

Wrapped in aluminum foil was a wrinkled, stale-tasting pita surrounding meat that didn’t resemble donair. Most of it looked like crumbled, overcooked hamburger meat, with a few thin, greyish strips reminiscent of the ham on a Pizza Hut Hawaiian slice.

The spits were empty when I ordered, and based on what I was served, I questioned whether I’d been given reheated leftovers. The donair was buried beneath a mountain of wilted lettuce, with a few mushy tomatoes, only two banana peppers—and my pickles were missing entirely. A gross sweet-and-hot sauce blend completed the horrifying experience. It tasted like mayo spiked with Old El Paso’s mild taco sauce.

To make matters worse, the donair was unusually hot and burned my mouth. It refused to cool off, making me think it had been overheated in a microwave. The flavours never came together. There was no chemistry between the ingredients. Everything felt off—slimy, persistently hot, old-tasting, and completely incoherent. It even had a peculiar smell—like the armpit of someone who doesn’t believe in deodorant.

I know Pizza Unlimited has its supporters, but I don’t understand their fandom. This was the worst donair I’ve ever eaten—and one of the worst restaurant experiences I’ve ever had. From the filthy conditions to the excessive wait to the baffling final product, every part of the experience was bad.

It felt like a circle of hell.