Today, 26 August 2026, a Tuesday, we ate lunch in a Kurdish/Iraqi restaurant, Arbil City, in north London’s Kilburn district. While perusing the menu, I noticed that included “Pachaa”, which was described as:

“Specially cooked lamb, head, legs, and tongue, served with tandoori bread.”

We could not order it because it is only available on Friday and Saturday.

Seeing its name reminded me of a breakfast we enjoyed in 2016 at a restaurant in Tirana, Albania – a city about 1300 miles away from the Kurdish city of Erbil. We were hosted by an Albanian friend, Shemsi. Here is an account of that breakfast as I recorded it in my book “Rediscovering Albania”:

We woke at the beginning of a hot sunny day. Promptly at the time we had agreed, Shemsi picked us up from our hotel, and drove us to a suburb close to the centre of Tirana. The day before, we had asked him what comprises a typical traditional Albanian breakfast. The restaurant to which he took us, which had no name visible on its frontage, was where we discovered the answer to our question. The 3 of us seemed to be the youngest customers in the eatery that morning.

The centrepiece of the breakfast was paçe soup. This is a breakfast soup (‘khash’ in Armenian, ‘pache’ in Persian) made from meat, in fact from just about every part of an animal, in our case veal. It had a slightly gelatinous texture, but was delicious. It was served with pilaf, a rice and meat dish. The soup was accompanied by bowls of condiments such as red chilli grains, sliced garlic marinated in vinegar, and wonderful thick ‘homemade’ yoghurt. Bread was also available, and we washed the breakfast down with glasses of raki. Albanian raki, made from fruit not grain, is not at all like the aniseed flavoured Turkish raki; it is more like the Italian Grappa or some of the Yugoslav hard spirits. We were also served wine with this filling meal.

I do not know for certain, but I imagine that the Albanian word ‘paçe’ is both etymologically and gastronomically related to the word ‘pachaa’ on the menu at Arbil City.