Faith of GEMÜSE, If there's one legendary sandwich in this world, it's the kebab. And a legendary sandwich is bound to have a long and mysterious - and possibly turbulent and controversial - history. There will be disagreements over dates, disputes over who invented it, major diplomatic issues, chancellors cutting 120kg of meat with swords, political recuperation, and violent clashes between lovers of different sauces. We're in luck: the kebab is all that, slipped between two slices of bread. GEMÜSE gives you the lowdown.
1616 An anonymous painter from Istanbul slips what appears to be skewered meat spinning horizontally into one of his compositions. There are no flashing neon lights or a menu offering “Radical 3 steaks”, but experts agree that this could be the first performance of kebab as we know it today.
Turkey, mid-19th century: a certain Hamdi Usta and a hypothetical Iskender Efendi launched the hostilities and the trouble began. They both claimed to have invented the vertical cooking of meat (a claim denied by all the witch-hunters of the 15th century), asserted that their business was scalable, raised piastres and set up shop in all the commercial centres known at the time as “souks”.
Unfortunately for them a certain James Robertson, British photographer first photo of a doner kebab at 1854 The seller is neither Hamdi nor Iskender, the ball is in the middle, zero everywhere.
Well, that's the Turkish part, and it's not very clear. But what about the kebab as we know it today? “Döner”means “to turn”, “kebap”means “grill”, the “Döner Kebap”In other words, it's meat that grills as it spins. But who came up with the idea of stuffing it into flat bread with raw vegetables and sauce? Take a trip to Germany to find the beginnings of an answer.
Berlin, 1970s. Almost 1 million (do you know what that is, Larmina?) Turkish workers were “invited” to Germany. The menu in Germany at the time was sausage, cabbage, potatoes and beer. That's cool, but it's a hell of a lot less grilled meat on a spit, and that's a certainty. Kadir Nurman would have understood. As Germans like to eat on the go without getting their fingers too dirty, the self-proclaimed genius of the kebab stuffs the famous Turkish meat into a loaf of bread, garnishes it with a few crudités, sprinkles it with garlic sauce, and makes a killing. This man is said to have earned as little as €0.001 per kebab sold in France, and currently makes €360,000 a year. Oops.
And in France ? To make matters worse, there was no Turkey or Germany for kebabs in France at the time of the launch. Greece which democratised the product thanks to the Gyros (root of the words “rosti”, “rostative”, “gyroscopic”, and “Edmond Rostand” - well maybe -). It's in the 80s, near Saint-Michel in Paris, The first “Greek” appeared. Although the principle was the same, the product was radically different: grilled pork spit, Greek pita bread, tzatziki, red onions... The product would eventually change with the Lebanese, Turkish and North African influences in the years that followed, but the term would remain in Paris: at the end of the evening, people would have a “grec”.
Unfortunately battered by all these opposing influences, the poor French kebab struggles to find an identity of which it is proud, and the 2000s are marked by dodgy frozen spits, soft breads, crudités at the end of their life, and fluorescent orange Algerian sauce (delicious by the way, let it be known). It's a style, to be sure, but it needed a little refreshing.
This has now been achieved in 2018 : GEMÜSE is opening its doors with the firm intention of showing that kebabs can still be a way of life. A popular, universal and accessible dish, while being gourmet, colourful, complete and cooked. Inspired by 400 years of history, again mixing the Turkish, German, Lebanese, Greek and Syrian influences, GEMÜSE offers the French first Berliner Kebap of the country. In this little green shop in 61 rue Ramey, the kebab masters of GEMÜSE have been cooking up the best kebabs possible every day ever since, the ultimate kebap. Homemade marinated chicken kebab twice a day, crunchy, chewy pide bread, homemade sauces, avalanche of seasoned raw vegetables and marinated grilled vegetables, fresh cheese, herbs and lemon : GEMÜSE is gradually entering the Legend.
