Souvlaki (Thessaloniki Usage)

At Kostas on Agiou Dimitriou, which has grilled pork and chicken since 1986, the order starts with a single word. Ask for a souvlaki in Thessaloniki and the cook reaches for the skewer: pork cubes threaded on a thin wooden stick, turned over charcoal until the edges blacken in small patches and the fat spits onto the coals. The same word covers a plate of loose sticks and the meat slid off the stick into pita, and the next sentence out of the customer's mouth settles which. Kalamaki is the drinking straw here, and the standing joke has a visiting southerner asking for one and being handed a pita with a straw stuck in it.

The wrapped version is built in under a minute. The pita goes onto the grill first and comes off blistered and puffed, hot enough that the wax paper it is rolled in fogs at the edges. The cubes are pulled off the stick across the bread, then tomato and onion, a spoon of tzatziki, a fistful of fried potatoes, and for many customers ketchup, mustard or a paprika sauce. The cook twists the paper shut at the base with one hand while the other is already reaching for the next pita, and the roll goes across the counter still too hot to hold by the bread alone.

The first bites run from char and smoke to cold garlicky yogurt to the salt of the fries. The heat of the potatoes softens the tomato within a minute or two, so the roll gets eaten while it still steams, standing at the counter or walking, the paper peeled down a turn at a time and held at the base so the yogurt stays in the fold. Mustard brings a sharp edge that cuts the pork fat, and the paprika sauce adds a dull red warmth that lingers after the last bite. By the end the bottom of the wrap has gone soft and savoury with juice, while the top is still chewy from the grill.

Pork is the everyday meat, cut small so every face of the cube takes colour over the coals while the middle stays damp, and chicken sits beside it on most boards. The grill is loud work: fat flares on the coals, sticks are flipped in handfuls, and the smoke clings to the cook's apron and to the customer's jacket for the rest of the night. Seasoning stays short, mostly salt, because the charcoal does the flavouring. A plate of sticks comes with bread on the side, and the wrapped order puts the same cubes inside the pita. The rotisserie cone is a separate order on the same counter, asked for with its own words.

What a customer says at the counter is a short list: which meat, plate or wrapped, what goes in, what stays out. A first-time visitor learns it by listening to the person ahead in line, and fried potatoes in the wrap are the default. A good share of the trade is late. Zygos in Stavroupoli began as a canteen outside a nightclub of the same name before it settled into a small shop on Lagkada, and the grills of the centre keep their charcoal lit for people leaving bars and tavernas after midnight, when a hot wrap in paper is the cheapest dinner still on offer.

Savvikos and the 1947 counter

Skewered pork over coals is old in the Aegean, and the wrapped souvlaki is a twentieth-century street food. Its spread is usually placed in the refugee neighbourhoods of Thessaloniki and Athens in the 1940s, when cheap grilled meat could be sold from a canteen to people with little to spend.

The Thessaloniki counter with the oldest date attached to it is Savvikos, at Aristotelous 8. The shop dates its start to 1947, when a grandfather named Savvikos first offered his souvlaki to the public, and says the quality and taste have held while everything else about the business changed. That date is the shop's own account, and no independent record of it has surfaced.

The canteen end of the trade has a paper trail of its own in Annoula's Canteen, run by Tasos and Annoula Kyriakidis. It opened around late 2008 on Plastira Street in Aretsou, moved in January 2009 to the gate of the Dalipi military camp, closed in March 2015 and reopened on Karamanli Street in 2016.