The American döner kebab is defined by an edge that exists for only a few seconds. Stacked seasoned meat turns slowly against a vertical heat source, and the cook shaves the outer face the instant it crisps and browns, so every portion is a thin sheet that is seared on one side and just-cooked on the other. That shaved-to-order surface is the whole sandwich. It cannot be made in advance and it cannot be reheated into the same thing, which is why a döner is a sandwich you order while the meat is moving and not before.
The craft is in the cone and the fold. The meat is layered and pressed onto the spit so it cooks in a continuous gradient from crisp face to raw interior, and the cook reads that gradient by eye, taking only the band that is ready. The carrier is a flatbread, warmed on the same heat or a press until it is pliable, then folded or rolled around the meat rather than stacked under it, because a flexible bread is the only thing that contains shaved meat, shredded cabbage and onion, tomato, and a yogurt-and-garlic or hot sauce in one hand without the load spilling. The sauce is structural here, not a finish: it binds the loose shavings to the vegetables and the bread so the parcel holds through the last bite. This is built to be assembled in the time it takes to shave one portion and handed across a counter, which is exactly why the German-Turkish street format travels intact into American cities rather than flattening into something else.
It is worth keeping the döner separate from the shawarma it is constantly confused with. Both shave meat off a vertical spit, but the seasoning, the bread, and the sauce convention differ, and treating them as one sandwich erases what each is. Within the döner line the variations are mostly the meat and the carrier: a thinner lavash wrap against a thicker pocketed bread, a chicken stack against a mixed lamb and beef one, the dürüm rolled tight versus the open pocket. Each of those is its own build and deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.