Love: Kebabs
Hate: Racism
All of the above statements are true. They’re as true today as they were when I coined the phrase 7 years ago or whenever the hell it was, on a whim as a @mangal2 Tweet. I cannot remember the exact moment where I was or what I was doing as the “inspiration” came to me, but I can place a high bet it was one of the usual scenarios:
1) I was on the bus
2) I was on the tube
3) I wasn’t able to sleep and lost deep in my thoughts at 4am and it hit me, and when the idea came to me, I chuckled, saved in on my iPhone notes and pressed send at 10am
4) The most common occurrence: Sat on the toilet.
I wanted to tweet something punchy and quick and funny and relevant. Football’s “Love Football, Hate Racism” was in vogue and I thought “Ah, so basic but true. Now, what do I love more than football itself and can relay back in a @mangal2 voice because I seek validation online from strangers 24/7 in a desperate attempt to be accepted as funny and irreverent? Kebabs, that’s what.” A so, as the story goes, the tweet was sent.
It got a little traction. There were anti-police/racism protests in Brixton a few years back and someone sprayed these eternal words on a wall and my devoted followers highlighted it to me. I was a bit spooked. Woah, ok, my silly words have found a physical home, I thought. A sign of things to come, but pretty exciting at the time as I pushed boundaries with what a restaurant should and shouldn’t tweet.
Anyway, I shut the Twitter down as my restaurant started doing well in real life, because I had no need to vent or talk my own establishment down anymore. I wasn’t stuck running a kebab house (stuck is a stupid word – but that’s how I truly felt for years as I juggled running a business on my own whilst having a young family in my mid to late 20’s and early 30s, a situation that’s rare in modern London life and quite isolating, to be honest). I finally had a restaurant, with my brother, which aligned with our vision moving forward, and the Twitter account felt a bit unnecessary to maintain as I felt it would discredit all the wonderful, brave changes we were implementing. And also, I mean, hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but fuck Twitter. Owned by Elon Musk. Spreader of awful, false information which affects elections and social perceptions, bot-infested and unregulated. No, thanks!
I shut the Twitter down and I removed the profile, so all historical tweets were gone. I wanted a clean break. Like an art piece that I destroyed, a novel I disowned, a limb removed, I moved on.
I moved on but I didn’t want my words to be stolen, and as we were looking into making some Mangal 2 merch to get us through difficult lockdown times by producing t-shirts and tote bags, I pitched putting those words into t-shirt form and just test how it would do. Sertac, coming from a graphic design past, was more than happy to create the look and typography, and we put the piece into motion. We found a t-shirt producing company. An Instagram post ensued and the reaction blew us away. We were unprepared for the level of interest it would spike and soon, before we knew it, before working with a proper distributor (we now, mercifully, work with Everpress), we were inundated with orders from around the world – Singapore, Europe, Australia, so much to North America, you name it – everywhere), which we’d send via a Post Office service (by we, I mean our old hero front of house Henry Catt would be sent to run that errand – god bless him and his patience). It was an absolute comedy operation where one day we’d be dealing with someone from New Zealand asking where their t-shirt is, and the next a weird third party t-shirt printer we didn’t know in Devon would be sending us lowkey racist-tone emails because he didn’t want to work with us – the irony, the conflict he must have felt with each t-shirt he screen-printed! RIP, king!
Anyway, Sertac soon brought Everpress to the table through his deep pocket of contacts and our work was way more streamlined and manageable. The first t-shirt was white with black letters; we added a black t-shirt with white letters soon after and the public went bananas. The first year of selling these t-shirts really got us out of a financial blackhole. Years of tweets finally paid some monetary benefit and I felt some vindication for all my lost adolescence venting away online whilst a lot of my contemporaries who had similar accounts (I’m looking at you, The Dolphin Pub) were made social media partners at tech start ups and raking it in, whilst I was managing a restaurant with endless debt and problematic staff and quite a few ungrateful customers who’d flip out when their free humus didn’t arrive on time.
And then the worst happened.
Given the t-shirts’ popularity and exposure, a lot of, let’s call them fuckheads, started copying our message and printing it through their own channels. We’d see an increasing number of sites making our merch without permission, charging less, and not crediting us nor Everpress. Were we annoyed? Yes, we were. We still are. It’s theft and sadly that’s the way the world works. Our sales have plummeted. Dropped by 9/10s some months. For every bit of excitement when we see Peggy Gou wearing our t-shirt, or it’s on Great British Meme’s (or whatever the hell it’s called – I cannot emphasise how OFF Twitter I am – and sadly, no credit to us) twitter handle again with over 5k likes, we feel that extra bit of annoyance all that traction is being fed elsewhere, swallowed up by fraudulent wankers stealing our ideas and our creativity and endeavours. Festival season is in full swing and for every Love: Kebabs, Hate: Racism t-shirt we see being shared on the gram and going viral, we’re cheated out of our earning that extra bit more, and bottom-feeders are only benefitting. And the biggest shame is, it prevents us contributing more to anti-racism charities like SARI – Stand Against Racism & Inequality, which we always do by giving 15% of all profits to.
So please, do the right thing and order through Everpress. Love: Mangal 2, Hate: Injustice.