Albania

Restaurant - Alba
Location - Kilburn

By Boeing : 2693 miles

By Boris Bike : 7.3 miles

Sated and surprised I left Afghanistan and travelled west to Albania, a land buttressed by the Balkans but bestrode by Greece. Rather than clamber through mountain passes my route took me via the Bakerloo line to Kilburn. Once again my destination had hardly earned a reputation as a tourist trap. In fact I’ve never met anyone who has been there be it for business, break or bereavement.

Despite a glorious climate and long expanses of unspoilt beaches Albania is a country that has never planned a second runway let alone a fifth. Sadly this seeming lack of appeal was shared by Alba, the small Albanian café and restaurant where I dined, alone, literally alone, on a Friday evening. For restaurants, i surmised, at least one of these three key elements must be enticing: location, cuisine and atmosphere. The rest are left to wrestle with the rents.



The owner, a portly, gregarious Kosovan, didn’t seem too downcast at the lack of custom. It appeared to be a typical start to a lonely, loss-making weekend. Glancing down the menu I struggled to find any Albanian dishes. There was page after page of pasta and Panettone, elegantly scribed in Italian, but not one authentic dish. Then I found some, on the final page, hidden below the aperitifs. The chef seemed bemused when I ordered them and spent several minutes rustling around in cupboards trying to find the ingredients. While he did this I looked out of the window and saw a pink cardboard sign affixed to a pane offering ‘English breakfasts, served all day.’ It was clearly a case of entice the English or face eviction: diversify or default.

A brief stroll in the area revealed that this restaurant was not an exclave but part of a bustling enclave in this western district of London. Albanians snipped away in a local barbers while their countrymen sold packets of pastilles in a newsagent. I believe I was even given a Standard by a swarthy Albanian gent at the exit of the tube station. It was these men, missing the smells and sounds of home that provided the custom. Or i expect that was the idea, maybe they’d been in London long enough to sample the alternatives, however disloyal that may appear.



Albania, like Afghanistan, is a country that has been claimed by one empire after another from the times of antiquity. Greece, Rome, Byzantium and Ottoman Turkey all conquered this abundant land, took what they wanted and left. But unlike Afghanistan, rather than enhance their sense of nation this serial subjugation has left Albania dull and diluted. The owner even admitted as much, ‘The Ottomans left us so many words we forgot about our own. The young just speak English.’ With a reported 10,000 people dying in vendetta wars in the last twenty years the phrase ‘let bygones be bygones’ certainly appears to have fallen out of common usage.

It is no accident that the post war world has virtually forgotten Albania. Its communist leader, Enver Hoxha, was not one for global diplomacy. In fact he detested any mobility, be it spatial or social, prohibiting air travel and banning private transport in his forty year reign. For the English it conjures an image of country close to but not as cultural as Greece, a bit like how we perceive the Welsh. It is in the right vicinity, we think, but is there any reason to visit in particular? As students will testify the reason, in Aberwswth or Albania, can only boil down to one thing: because it is cheap. And therein lies the appeal. Unvisited can just as easily be explained as unspoilt; basic, in less cynical eyes, is bohemian.

In Albania it is not pragmatic to be patriotic. Today’s enemy could be tomorrow’s ruler. This is a country that faced the ignominy of being invaded by Mussolini. After several years this fascist megalomaniac was supplanted by that icon of justice and egalitarianism, Adolf Hitler. Even the most inscrutable poker face would fail to reveal the disappointment of such a hand. But this ‘borrowed’ nationhood has had an odd, unpredictable effect. The owner and his staff spoke of Greater Albania, an entity that traverses the lines and borders of maps and encompasses what we, in our starched collar conformity, naively assume are separate cultures and countries. For a Kossovan to own an Albanian restaurant cannot be compared to Michel Le Roux managing a Little Chef.

In this context my expectations of the meal were not high. But undeterred I asked for the national dish, lamb baked in yoghurt. I was met with a frown and told “ It takes too long to cook.” I settled for a beef grill. Ten minutes a later a bulbous burger was dished up accompanied by cabbage and pitta. It was as inspiring as a Alan Titchmarsh novel, but without the sauce. The blandness of the meal was saved by a yoghurt and cucumber soup, referred to as a liquid salad, that was poured over the meat. This leant it a blessed semblance of flavour.

As I rose to leave I noticed framed pictures of shepherds roaming Albanian meadows. They seemed happy.