Doner kebab

• 1. Introduction

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  Doner kebab, a Turkish dish of seasoned meat roasted on a vertical spit, supported more than 16,000 establishments in Germany in 2011. Together they brought in yearly sales of €3.5 billion. That is a remarkable record for a meal that began in the Ottoman Empire as a slowly turning cone of meat. The figures raise a few questions. Who first decided to stand the meat upright? Who tucked the slices into bread and sold them from a stand? And why does one idea answer to so many names in so many languages, from gyros to shawarma to donair?

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• 2. Upright in Bursa

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  Stacks of seasoned sliced meat were being cooked on a horizontal rotisserie in the Ottoman Empire by at least the 17th century, in a style similar to the cağ kebab. The vertical rotisserie arrived no later than the mid-19th century. The town of Bursa, in modern-day Turkey, is often considered the birthplace of the vertically roasted version.

  Yavuz İskenderoğlu tells a family story about his grandfather, İskender Efendi. As a child in 1850s Bursa, İskender Efendi had the idea of roasting lamb vertically at his father's restaurant, instead of laying it flat. The idea was a success. Some years later the dish became known as doner kebap.

  An inverted cone of seasoned meat is the heart of the method. The cone turns slowly beside a vertical cooking element. The operator slices thin shavings from the outer layer as it cooks, so each portion is freshly cooked.

  Yet İskender Efendi may not have been first. Hamdi Usta, from Kastamonu, may have preceded him around 1830, so the true first spit remains uncertain.

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• 3. A Word That Turns

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  The Turkish verb dönmek gives the dish its name, and the full Turkish title is döner kebap. English borrowed the first word from that title and usually drops the dots from the letter ö. The second word, kebab, reached English from the Arabic kabāb, partly through Urdu, Persian and Turkish. It can describe many different roasted or grilled meat dishes.

  English has used kebab since the late 17th century. Doner or döner kebab is known only from the mid-20th century or later. In German the dish is spelled Döner Kebab, and the sandwich is often called ein Döner. In British English the same sandwich is often called simply a kebab.

  Greek speakers first used the word döner, written ντονέρ, before the dish became known as gyros. The word γύρος is a calque of the Turkish name, meaning it copies the original in translation. The Arabic name شاورما (shāwarmā) comes from a second Turkish word, çevirme. Persians call the dish kebab torki.

  Canadians would bend the word furthest of all, into donair, in a story that begins with a Greek immigrant in Halifax.

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• 4. Istanbul and Its Plates

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  Beyti Güler opened his restaurant in Istanbul in 1945, roughly a century after the vertical spit appeared. Doner kebab was introduced and popularized in that city most famously by him. Journalists soon discovered the place. It went on to serve doner and other kebab dishes to kings, prime ministers, film stars and celebrities. The sandwich form has been sold in Istanbul since at least the mid-1960s.

  Turkey today serves doner in many forms. A porsiyon is doner on a slightly heated plate, sometimes with a few grilled peppers or broiled tomatoes alongside. Pilavüstü puts the meat on a base of pilaf rice.

  İskender is the specialty of Bursa. It comes on an oblong plate, over pide, with a dash of pepper or tomato sauce and boiling fresh butter, and is commonly served with yoghurt. The name Kebapçı İskender is trademarked by Yavuz İskenderoğlu, whose family still runs the restaurant in Bursa.

  A dürüm wraps the meat in thin lavaş, which is sometimes grilled after rolling to make it crisper. Ankara is known for the soslu dürüm, also called SSK, from sos, soğan and kaşar. It contains İskender sauce, which makes it juicier. Istanbul prefers the kaşarlı dürüm döner, where grated kaşar cheese is wrapped in and toasted until it melts.

  A tombik, or gobit, is doner in a bun-shaped pita with a crispy crust and a soft inside, usually with less meat than a dürüm. The most filling version is the ekmekarası, a whole or half loaf of regular Turkish bread packed with doner.

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• 5. Berlin Builds the Sandwich

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  Nevzat Salim, a Bursa native, and his father began selling Iskender Kebap in Reutlingen in 1969. That is the earliest claim to bringing the dish from Turkey to Germany. The Association of Turkish Döner Producers in Europe, known as ATDID, points instead to Kadir Nurman, a Turkish guest worker. His stand at West Berlin's Zoo Station in 1972 helped establish the doner sandwich as a fast food option.

  The competing claims may be hard to prove, but the modern sandwich is tied to Berlin. In 2011 the Berlin-based association recognized that it originated and spread there through Turkish immigrants. The market it entered was not empty. Pork gyros had already become a fast food in West Germany, and it dominated the street food scene with Italian pizza during the 1970s.

  The first doner served in Berlin held only meat, onions and a bit of salad. Over time it grew into a dish with abundant salad, vegetables and a choice of sauces, sold in large and affordable portions. Even an order placed in Turkish in Berlin asks for hot sauce with the German word scharf. That small habit shows how hybrid the Berlin style became. A 2007 survey found that many people consider the doner the most characteristic food of Berlin. The Berlin style, served with pita bread, influenced doner in Germany and other nations.

  Tarkan Taşyumruk, president of ATDID, gave figures in 2010. Around 350 firms in Germany produced more than 400 tonnes of doner meat every day. At the association's fair he said: "Annual sales in Germany amount to €2.5 billion. That shows we are one of the biggest fast-foods in Germany." In many German cities the doner is at least as popular as hamburgers or sausages, especially among young people.

  Beef or veal and chicken are widely used instead of the more expensive lamb. Turkey, called Truthahn, and vegetarian versions have become increasingly popular. The Döner-Teller serves the ingredients loose on a plate, and the Döner-Box layers them on top of French fries.

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• 6. Cousins Overseas

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  By at least the 1930s, the version popular in the Arab world, shawarma, was sold in restaurants in Mexico by Lebanese immigrants. From it came al pastor, which literally means "in the style of the shepherd." The name points to the lamb often used in shawarma, though al pastor is normally made with pork. By the 1960s the taco al pastor had evolved from the shawarma.

  Greek refugees in the 1920s likely brought the Greek variation to Greece proper, because of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. It later turned into gyros. By 1971 gyros was already popular in both Greece and New York City.

  In the United States the dish is best known by its Greek name. Numerous people claim to have introduced it in the 1960s, and mass production followed in the 1970s. By 1970 the newly coined name gyros was commonly used, though some Greek restaurants still used both names into the 1970s.

  In Halifax, Nova Scotia, the story took a sweeter turn. According to Leo Gamoulakos, his father, the Greek immigrant Peter Gamoulakos, first sold Greek-style gyros at Velos Pizza in the suburb of Bedford. It did not catch on. So in 1972 he swapped the customary pork and lamb for spiced ground beef, added Lebanese flatbread, and invented a distinctive sweet sauce of condensed milk, vinegar, sugar and garlic.

  He called the result doner, but it came to be pronounced and spelled donair. In 1973 he opened the first King of Donair restaurant on Quinpool Road in Halifax. Other people dispute the origin. Halifax named donair its official food in 2015, and the dish has since spread beyond Atlantic Canada in various forms.

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• 7. Local Twists

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  Greek restaurateurs paved the road for doner in Paris, where they sold the sandwich grec, or "Greek sandwich." As the Turkish community grew, the term was gradually replaced by "kebab" or "sandwich turc." The dish became especially popular with the country's large North African population in the 1980s. A typical French kebab includes sauce blanche, a mayonnaise and yogurt blend, and french fries stuffed into the bread itself. France has more than 10,000 kebab shops, which sell about 300 million a year, making doner the third most popular fast food after hamburgers and pizza.

  The first doner kebab shop in London opened in 1966. By the late 1970s such shops were a familiar sight in provincial cities. Today the British doner is especially popular after a night out, served with chips, in naan or in pita. German Doner Kebab, a Glasgow-based chain, runs 100 restaurants in the United Kingdom.

  In Rotterdam, a hairdresser named Nathaniel Gomes asked his local kebab shop for a special order. The result is the kapsalon, a Dutch word meaning "hairdressing salon." It is French fries topped with doner or shawarma meat, garlic sauce and a layer of gouda cheese. The dish is baked or broiled until the cheese melts, then covered with dressed salad greens and more sauce. It is usually served in a disposable metal tray.

  Australia produced the halal snack pack. It combines halal-certified doner meat with chips and sauces such as chili, garlic and barbecue, traditionally in a styrofoam container. The Macquarie Dictionary chose the name as its People's Choice Word of the Year for 2016.

  In Vietnam, people who once lived in Germany brought the doner home, and stalls now stand throughout Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. The local bánh mỳ döner kebab uses pork instead of beef and lamb, topped with sour vegetables and chili sauce. In Tokyo, kebabs are mostly chicken, sometimes beef, and choices of sauce include Thousand Island, spicy and garlic.

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• 8. Rules and Risks

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  Media reports have raised health concerns about doner kebab, including hygiene during overnight storage and reheating of partially cooked meat. Others have questioned its quality, and its high salt, fat and calorie levels. Some investigations found poor-quality ingredients, or meat types other than the ones advertised.

  Following several outbreaks of E. coli food poisoning, the Canadian government in 2008 introduced a set of recommendations. One was that the meat should be cooked a second time after it is sliced from the rotisserie. Germany takes a firm line of its own. Any doner meat placed on the rotisserie must be sold the same day, and freezing partially cooked meat for later sale violates health regulations.

  In 2022, Turkey applied for döner to receive EU traditional speciality guaranteed status, which would protect the recipe rather than any geographic origin. The proposal says beef must come from cattle at least 16 months old. It must be marinated with set amounts of animal fat, yogurt or milk, onion, salt and thyme, plus black, red and white peppers. The meat must be sliced from the spit into pieces 3 to 5 millimeters thick.

  The German Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Regional Identity objected, because the proposal differs from typical German preparations. Vegetable, turkey and some veal kebabs would apparently no longer be allowed.

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