Banished, famished

Farewell to schwarma, if the bumbling bureaucrats have their way. First they forced tiny kebab shops to put their grills inside, removing a traditional and temptingly-aromaed sight from the street.

Unsurprise-surprise: it's making the restaurants too hot for people to sit in:

ABU DHABI — For small shawarma outlets in the capital who shifted their grill into the restaurant following orders from the authorities, it may well be a case worse than "from the frying pan into the fire." They may be forced to remove shawarma altogether from their menu.

The authorities have found that the shifting of shawarma grills inside small restaurants was a "hot" move, in that it made the outlets uncomfortable with the heat produced from the grills making the atmosphere inside stifling.

If these authorities had actually bothered to heed the concerns of restaurateurs in the first place, or just rubbed their two brain cells together, they might have anticipated this before the fact.

Exactly what implications does this have for outdoor events like the Global Village? Will they ban schwarmas there, and everything else cooked outside, such as saj bread? The reason for moving the grills inside was "pollution". Given we breathe in gallons of thick sand smog, industrial fumes and traffic exhaust daily, does anyone care about a few more flecks of dust on their schwarma?