Ionce shared a bed with a doner kebab. I’d hungrily joined a 3 a.m. queue for much needed post-pub sustenance, only to pass out as soon as I sat down on my bed to eat it. It was a vinegary and leathery bedfellow to wake up to, but I’ve felt ever since that spending a full night with a doner qualifies me as an expert.
I can tell you that any major city’s kebab purveyors can be ranked by the number of pints you need to have drunk before you feel like tucking in. Think of this number like the zones on the London Tube map. At the smart end there’s the zone one kebab: restaurant-grade and easily enjoyed as part of a full sit-down meal. At the other end there’s zone six: a last resort on the way home from a six-pint (or more) pub session.
Each kebab house, whatever its zone, is run by a patriarch who is referred to as ‘bossman’ (‘Cheers bossman, go easy on the garlic’). They oversee everything in their kebab kingdom, from the daily preparation of the carcass-sized kebab stacks – made by marinating lamb or beef and then layering it on to a vertical rotisserie machine – to flirting with the friendlier customers and acting as a bouncer to the nocturnal and usually inebriated clientele who provide most of bossman’s business.
An important part of the doner-buying experience is the decor. One place I used to frequent in kebab zone six had a display of lemons that seemed fresh the first time I visited but thereafter never changed. When I moved house and came to say goodbye to the bossman, I took a close look at the lemons and saw that they were encapsulated in a thick layer of mould. My new – zone three say – local has a display of seafood. Seeing the same beady black-pearl-eyed king prawn I saw the Saturday before gives me pause each week. I order anyway. They’re just that good: savoury, salty, spicy, fatty sliced lamb, salad and sauce (mixed is a must) wrapped in a fluffy comfort-blanket flatbread. It’s the greatest of all-time post-pub snacks.
Kebabs have been a staple of Ottoman cooking for centuries, but it was 1970s Berlin that birthed the doner. When post-war West Germany experienced its Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), a huge industrial ramping up needed thousands of migrant workers to take the jobs that couldn’t be filled on account of the Wall cutting off the labour supply from the east. Turkey provided the answer and over 12 years 650,000 Gastarbeiter (guest workers) and their families settled in Germany, bringing the Ottoman vertical rotisserie cooking style with them.
Doner is a hot topic in Germany, where 1.3 billion are consumed every year. This month the youth wing of the German Left party proposed an economic intervention of which their Soviet political antecedent would surely be proud. Doner kebab prices would be capped with £4 billion of annual state funding, ensuring everyone could get their hands on the perfect snack for under a fiver. Last year a voter confronted Chancellor Olaf Scholz about the cost of living, saying: ‘Speak with Vladimir Putin… I’m paying €8 for a doner.’
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