“I can still remember when doner kebabs were sold for €3.50,” reminisced one teenager amid calls for a price brake to stop rising kebab costs.
The German capital is the birthplace of that ubiquitous European fast food, the doner kebab, and it shows.
Kebab shops line streets of many German cities, particularly in Berlin, and the scent of roasting, skewered meat is never far off.
Some two-million doner kebabs — meat wrapped in bread, topped with sauces and vegetables — are consumed a day in Germany, according to an industry association, quite a lot for a country of 83 million people. And the doner kebab has even supplanted the old stalwart, the currywurst — fried veal sausage topped with ketchup and curry powder — as the most popular fast-food dish in the country, according to a 2022 survey.
Turkish shawarma doesn’t exist. That’s more towards the middle east. You won’t really, find it in Turkey. Though I wish you could, because more diversity is always more better.
Anyway, the way naming kebap dishes works (kebap is not a dish, it’s the name of a large and diverse family of meat dishes, not unlike salad) is you can introduce all sorts of variations into an existing dish, afterwards you’re free to slap your own name on it. There are hundreds of examples of this in Turkish cuisine. So, Halifax Donair is fine. You invented a new variation of an existing kebap dish, you get to name it and claim ownership. That’s how it is. What Germany has done is put their own regional spin on döner kebap, which had long existed, and then claim to have invented döner kebap itself. Call it Berlin kebap or whatever, but don’t use the name of an existing dish. That’s like claiming ownership of pizza margherita just because you added a couple new toppings and baked it in a square pan. It’s dumb and wrong.