Kebab

At a Polish kebab counter the cook runs a long knife down the spit, and the first sound is a faint crackle as the browned outer edge of the stack comes away in curls. The curls fall onto a split bułka already holding shredded cabbage, tomato and onion. The heat of the meat wilts the cabbage where they touch while the middle of the salad stays cold and squeaky between the teeth. Then comes the question every counter asks, łagodny, czosnkowy czy ostry, mild, garlic or hot, and the answer decides the character of the whole meal. The finished kebab goes into foil, the crackle softens inside it within a minute, and what the customer carries away is a warm, heavy parcel that leaks a little at the corner and rewards eating it on the pavement, straight away.

The meat is what the counter is judged on. Beef, chicken or a mixed blend is seasoned, stacked and pressed onto the spit, then roasted against the heater so the surface browns and the inside keeps its juice. A cook who shaves to order gets thin curls with dark crisp edges and a fatty sweetness at the centre. A cook who scrapes meat from a tray where it has sat gets grey, tired strips that chew like wet cardboard. The salad has the same short window: shredded cabbage dressed in advance goes limp and pools water in the bottom of the bread, and a flood of sauce soaks the crumb to paste within a couple of bites. The smell that drifts across the pavement from a busy counter is rendered fat, charred edges and warm spice, and it works on passers-by long before the sign is legible.

The bread carries more than it looks. A bułka is a small wheat roll with a thin crust and a soft crumb, and at the kebab counter it is split, warmed and sometimes pressed on the grill for a few seconds so the cut faces toast and stay firm against the wet filling. Some counters add pickled cucumber or sauerkraut to the salad, a local habit that puts a sour edge under the fat of the meat. The same filling also goes into a thin rolled flatbread or onto a tray beside fries, and the kebab w bułce remains the format that most people picture when they say the word. Eaten from the foil, the roll collapses slowly from the bottom, so the last bites tend to be mostly sauce-soaked bread, which many regulars count as the best part.

Sauce is where a Polish customer exercises a preference. Counters usually offer a white garlic sauce, a mild sauce, and a red hot sauce, with the option of two together, and the sauces are commonly built on a mayonnaise or yoghurt base. A spoon of the garlic goes on cold against hot meat, so the first mouthful has two temperatures at once, and the creamy coating clings to the cabbage and to the fat. The hot sauce arrives as a bright, sharp burn that builds on the tongue after a few seconds and sends the eater looking for a drink. Asking for a mix is routine, and the half-and-half order, garlic to soothe and hot to wake the palate up, is a standard way to settle the argument between the two.

The kebab became a mass habit in the 1990s, when Poland opened its markets and its streets filled with small private food stalls. One account has the first stand in the capital opening in 1992 in the Sezam department store by Warszawa Centralna station, run by a Turkish businessman named Ahmet Maho Kazkondu, and the Efes kebab bar on ulica Francuska in Saska Kępa has served from 1994. The counters offered something the older Polish fast food had not: hot meat, fresh salad and a choice of heat, ready within a couple of minutes at a price that made it an ordinary lunch. In the years that followed, spits turned in shop windows across Polish cities, and the sandwich moved from novelty to default.

Origin and history

The earliest Polish kebab is credited to a stand in Sopot on ulica Królowej Jadwigi, opened by an Iraqi, Muhie Al-Nakshabandi, who is most often said to have sold it from summer 1972 as the Bar Kebab. Sources disagree on the year, giving 1970 and 1973 as well, and they disagree on the spelling of his name, but they agree on the street and on the food: lamb served in a bun or flatbread with pickles and sauce, a build closer to a skewer sandwich than to the later spit-shaved doner.

Two decades separate the Sopot stand from the counters of the 1990s. The vertical spit, the shaved curls, the cabbage under the meat and the mild-garlic-hot question belong to that later wave, and the kebab eaten now in Warsaw or Gdańsk follows its format.

The shop on Królowej Jadwigi still trades as Kebab Sopocki, and its sign carries the words 1970 rok, a claim two years earlier than the 1972 opening that most accounts repeat, and the stand has kept serving on the same street into the 2020s.