3 kebabs in Berlin

A video guide.

A kebab in the UK is seldom a seemly experience. Most often procured from dubious-looking vans and sticky-looking shopfronts, almost exclusively past the hour of 2am, they are only as enjoyable as their necessary prelude, drinking to excess. Great at the start, bad by the end, and the meat sweats will linger like a bad hangover the morning after.

Often, there’s also the sense that the kebab is produced just as thoughtlessly as it is consumed. Dedicated kebab shops are rare, instead there are just places with too-long menus whose only controlling thought is “greasy garbage”. Despite this menu’s purported variety, the polystyrene-like chicken burger, the cardboard-like chips, and the not-worthy-of-the-name pizza will all inevitably taste the same after soaking in the same grease and being vomited on by the same bottle of garlic mayo. Kebabs appear as a cameo on the menu in the destructive spirit of “why the hell not?” and the associated “elephant’s leg” of meat appears in the window more like a warning than an advert. A kebab in the UK is in every sense the product of a series of bad decisions. 

Suffice to say, the kebabs in Berlin have been something of a culture shock. Of course, it stands to reason that the home of the döner kebab does kebabs differently. Döner kebabs came to Berlin with the wave of Turkish Gastarbeiter in the 60s and 70s. The Wirtschaftswunder that demanded so much immigrant labour slowed down, leaving many Turks unemployed, and so they turned to one of the oldest and most reliable forms of business for people, especially immigrants, to make a living: food establishments. They took the pre-existing döner from Turkey, a meat-focussed dish of lamb or beef served with simple sides like onions and spices, and made it amenable to the new market, adding bread, which satisfied European tastes, and vegetables, which addressed growing health consciousness.

To my mind, it’s the vegetables that make the biggest difference. Sure, kebabs in the UK are filled with salad, but that’s just cheap filler like iceberg lettuce and red onions, whereas, in Berlin, the addition of roasted vegetables reaches a new dimension. Things like carrots, potatoes, and aubergines are roasted until golden and caramelised and sweet, and then added generously to the kebabs. The meat is also a gamechanger. Kebab meat in the UK is less like meat and more like meatloaf (or even just “loaf”), and you can never really be sure if what you’re eating is in fact food or just strips of an old, sweat-salty leather jacket. Here, whether the kebab shop uses chicken, lamb, or beef, every piece of meat still looks like one, and you can actually see the individual fillets making up the giant skewers.

Interestingly, though, the status of döner meat is in peril. In 2022, the Istanbul-based International Döner Kebab association applied to include döner kebabs on the EU list of “Traditional Specialties Guaranteed” (Spain’s Serrano ham and Italy’s pizza Napoletana are included; the UK’s Bramley apple pie filling was formerly). They would stipulate that beef kebabs must be from cattle that are at least 16 months old, lamb kebabs must use sheep that are at least six months old, and chicken kebabs must be made from breast and/or legs, which would preclude many kebab shops from being able to call their dishes “döner”. The EU court is currently hearing objections from Germany. Just as the origin of döner kebabs is symptomatic of contemporary economic developments, the verdict reached by the EU court in Brussels will be telling of current relations between EU and Turkey—the significance of this dish is not to be downplayed.

The EU court has four months to make up its mind, but, in the meantime, I’ve been trying and comparing some of the city’s best kebab shops.  The standard has confirmed my feeling that a kebab in the UK is always a bad decision, but, whatever decision the EU court reaches, the decision to eat a (döner) kebab in Berlin will always be a good one.