Souvlaki Apo Kalamaki (Thessaloniki)

A Thessaloniki grill cook lines up thin wooden sticks over charcoal, each one threaded with small cubes of pork cut to a matching size so that every face of every cube colours at the same moment. Fat drips onto the coals and flares, and the smoke it throws settles into the pita laid at the cooler edge of the grate. When the cubes are done they are slid off the stick into the warm bread, and the customer has usually said a single sentence, souvlaki with everything, because the list behind that word is short and known. Kalamaki served on a plate beside bread and kalamaki slid off into a pita are the same meat from the same grill.

The fried potatoes go in last and hot, so for the first minute the wrap holds three temperatures at once: pork with scorched edges, fries still steaming, and a spoon of garlicky tzatziki that the heat has not yet reached. Tomato and raw onion add a wet crunch against the soft potato. Ketchup and mustard sit beside the yogurt for anyone who asks, a sweet-sharp edge that northern counters commonly offer. The pita is rolled in paper and twisted shut at the base, warm enough through the wrapper to hold from underneath, and it is eaten from the top down while the yogurt slides toward the bottom of the fold.

Pork is the everyday meat, and a little fat in the cube matters, because a lean piece goes dry in the seconds it takes the outside to blacken. The seasoning stays at salt and the smoke itself. A fire that has burned down too low steams the cubes grey, and a stick left unturned scorches one side while the other stays pale. Chicken is grilled on the same board for those who ask for it, and some tavernas keep a skewer of grilled vegetables for the same pita. A cook who works a full grill handles sticks in fistfuls, turning them with the same motion every time, and the ones nearest the hottest coals are the first to come off.

In Thessaloniki the word on the counter sign is souvlaki for the stick and for the pita roll alike, and kalamaki is the straw in a drink, so a southerner asking for "souvlaki apo kalamaki" is speaking Athenian. The rotisserie cone has its own word, gyros. Most of the trade is late: people leaving bars and tavernas after midnight stop at a grill, stand under the extractor fan, and eat the wrap out of its paper with grease already dotting the wrapper through. A pork pita is among the cheapest hot meals in the centre at that hour, and its warmth in the hand on a cold night is a large part of the appeal.

Each customer builds the wrap aloud. Thessaloniki counters are said to treat every pita as a "sandwich" to be itemised: tzatziki yes, onion no, fries in, a line of mustard. Cooks answer by assembling it in under a minute without writing anything down, and a regular can shorten the order to two words. The fries are the component that varies most between shops and customers; some are scattered in the pita and some ride on the side in the paper, and the argument over which is correct has no official answer. The bread, the pork and the yogurt stay put.

Origin and history

Souvlaki rolled in pita belongs to the twentieth century. Athens accounts date the first souvlaki shop to 1924, the Aigyptiako in Nikaia, opened by Isaak Meraklidis, an Armenian from Adana who had come from Egypt, and popular histories place souvlaki served with bread in the 1950s. Skewered pork over coals reaches much further back, to Homeric descriptions of meat grilled on spits, but the pita wrap that fills the Thessaloniki counter belongs to the decades of the city's growth after the war.

Emigration from Greece in the 1950s and 1970s carried the recipe to the United States, Australia and Germany, while at home the northern wrap settled into its own build of pork, tomato, onion, tzatziki, and fries, with ketchup and mustard as common additions. No record names the first Thessaloniki cook to roll pork souvlaki into a pita. The dated evidence sits at the counters that survive.

One of them announces its date in its name. Diagonios 1977, a grill in the centre of Thessaloniki, sells pork souvlaki by the stick or wrapped in pita, and is reported to stay open until 3 a.m. on weekends. A shop that put its opening year on the sign has now been feeding the city's late crowd for nearly five decades, which covers the whole run of the northern pork pita from the late 1970s to now.