Yesterday, we lost a dear friend. On the face of it, Loki was just a humble hamburger bar, but Loki was much more than that.

My first flat in Belgrade was a stone’s throw away from Loki, in Dorcol. A stranger in a strange land, I was desperate for landmarks, for things I could depend upon. I quickly found the little collection of green huts on the run down square in Kralja Petra. Long before I could read cyrillic street names, let alone pronounce them reasonably, Loki was my personal sat nav system. I could take a taxi from anywhere in the city, mumble ‘Loki’, and end up on my doorstep.

It was at Loki that I learned many of my kindergarten lessons about life in Belgrade. Early struggles with language focused on the hand-written cyrillic menu, which even when I had deciphered them into latin meant little or nothing to me. Practice makes perfect, or at least, makes life more interesting. ‘Pljeskavica’, ‘Gurmanska’, ‘Pilece filet’, ‘Batak’ were among the first words of Serbian language I learned.

Under Loki’s wing, I also learned a little about the people of this great city. The long-suffering, hard-working ladies who staffed the little cabins 24/7 showed me warmth and kindness, smiling at my pathetic attempts to order and showing off their (equally limited) English whenever an opportunity arose. The simple transaction of ordering some food became a life-enhancing experience.

I noted the way that sense somehow always managed to arise from the apparent chaos of ordering, with crowds milling around, pushing in front of each other and people shouting orders and changes from the back of the crowd. For me, it became a model for many future observations of Belgrade and its serial contradictions. Somehow, every order ended up in the right hands, in roughly the right sequence, with the correct combination of extras. And somehow, it was all achieved with good grace and a large portion of humour from both customers and staff.

It was among those (often very late night) crowds that I learned something else about Belgrade; I was deeply struck by the almost complete absence of aggression. Those who have witnessed a similar late night crowd in London or Paris will know that buying a burger there can be tinged with fear, and too often, real violence. Not at Loki. Not once. In four years, the only mildly disorderly people I saw in that queue were an English friend and myself, after several Rakijas too many.

Those green huts also became a symbol for me of the (all too fleeting) triumph of individualism over globalisation and the relentless march of McDonald’s and its sorry ilk. While Loki stood firm, I thought, there is hope. Hope that quirkiness, character and charm still have real value in a plastic world.

It’s not that the street food at Loki was the very best. Serbian friends have since introduced me to other, more esoteric places where, arguably, the pljeskavica are more meaty, or the cevapcici more succulent. But at Loki, what you got was always real. It was fresh, and it was wholesome. It was often a veritable life-saver, too.

Visiting friends from England would inevitably find themselves at Loki after a long night of enjoying Belgrade’s finest bars – marvelling at the whole experience, just as I had marvelled myself. They took their stories of Loki back home, to join the growing ‘word-of-mouth’ campaign that will, eventually, bring down the terribly unfair image under which Serbia has laboured for way too long.

The working and serving condtions in those grubby huts would no doubt drive British Health and Safety Police into a raging froth; the ladies would often have a cigarette going, and sometimes, they might forget to put it down while they were adding my chilli sauce and luk. But I never heard of anyone having a complaint. If you have ever seen behind the scenes in a McDonald’s outlet, you would surely conclude that Loki was a kitchen from heaven.

They closed it down. After decades of service to the people, the value of the land finally trumped the value of the icon. Belgrade is a slightly poorer city tonight. But if Belgrade is about any one thing, it is surely about resurgence. Loki may be gone, but its spirit lives on. RIP, Loki.