Kadir Nurman (c.1933 – 24 October 2013)
n-tv.de, 26 October 2013 was a Turkish

restaurateur A restaurateur is a person who opens and runs restaurants professionally. Although over time the term has come to describe any person who owns a restaurant, traditionally it refers to a highly skilled professional who is proficient in all aspe ...

, widely credited with having in 1972, in

West Berlin West Berlin (german: Berlin (West) or , ) was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin during the years of the Cold War. Although West Berlin was de jure not part of West Germany, lacked any sovereignty, and was under mi ...

, introduced or "invented" the

fast food Fast food is a type of mass-produced food designed for commercial resale, with a strong priority placed on speed of service. It is a commercial term, limited to food sold in a restaurant or store with frozen, preheated or precooked ingredie ...

sandwich commonly known as the "kebab" (german: der Döner), consisting of traditional Turkish döner kebab meat stuffed together with mixed salad into a flatbread. Nurman received a lifetime achievement award from the Association of Turkish Döner Manufacturers in 2011. Afterwards, Nurman told the German magazine ''

Frankfurter Rundschau The ''Frankfurter Rundschau'' (FR) is a German daily newspaper, based in Frankfurt am Main. It is published every day but Sunday as a city, two regional and one nationwide issues and offers an online edition (see link below) as well as an e-pa ...

'' that he was unhappy with modern döner kebab sandwiches, as "there are too many ingredients" in them. Several people have been credited with being the "inventor of the döner kebab" in Germany, but such claims - including that for Nurman - are widely considered inaccurate. The familiar rotating döner kebab meat, roasted on a vertical spit and sliced with a sword, has been well known in Turkey since the mid-19th century. Its invention is attributed to the town of

Bursa ( grc-gre, Προῦσα, Proûsa, Latin: Prusa, ota, بورسه, Arabic:بورصة) is a city in northwestern Turkey and the administrative center of Bursa Province. The fourth-most populous city in Turkey and second-most populous in the ...

,Kenneth F. Kiple, Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas, eds., Cambridge World History of Food, Cambridge, 2000. . Vol. 2, p. 1147. and often credited to

İskender Efendi İskender is the Turkish form of the name Alexander, after Alexander the Great, and may refer to: People * İskender Alın (born 1984), Turkish footballer * İskender Köksal (born 1981), Turkish footballer * Iskender Pasha (governor of Ozi) (fl ...

; though it has also been ascribed to a cook named Hamdi, decades earlier in Kastamonu. Introduced in Nurman's native Istanbul in the 1940s by restaurateurs such as Beyti Güler, it became a world-famous delicacy. Döner kebab has been sold in sandwich form there since at least the mid-1960s. The Greek ''

gyro Gyro may refer to: Science and technology * GYRO, a computer program for tokamak plasma simulation * Gyro Motor Company, an American aircraft engine manufacturer * ''Gyrodactylus salaris'', a parasite in salmon * Gyroscope, an orientation-sta ...

'', was already a popular sandwich item in Athens and in New York City by 1971. Nurman himself did not claim to be the first person to have sold a sandwich of döner kebab meat even in Germany, saying in German: "Maybe someone else also did it, in some hidden corner, but no one noticed. The kebab became well-known through me."''Erfinder mag keine Döner mehr''
n-tv.de, 25. September 2011. Nevertheless, Nurman's prototypical '' kebab shop'' at West Berlin's busy central train station was a harbinger of a global trend, and his early version of the staple street snack was the framework upon which Berlin's Turkish ''

Gastarbeiter (; both singular and plural; ) are foreign or migrant workers, particularly those who had moved to West Germany between 1955 and 1973, seeking work as part of a formal guest worker program (). As a result, guestworkers are generally consider ...

'' immigrant community developed the distinctive style that has become one of the top-selling fast foods in Germany and much of Europe, and has spread around the world.

Life

Nurman was born in Istanbul, Turkey. He emigrated to Germany from Turkey in 1960, aged 26, and moved to Berlin from Stuttgart in 1966. In 1972 he set up a fast food stall at Berlin's

Berlin Zoologischer Garten railway station Berlin Zoologischer Garten station (german: Bahnhof Berlin Zoologischer Garten, colloquially Bahnhof Zoo, ) is a railway station in Berlin, Germany. It is located on the Berlin Stadtbahn railway line in the Charlottenburg district, adjacent t ...

, in what was then West Berlin. At his stall Nurman sold grilled meat and salad inside a

flat bread A flatbread is a bread made with flour; water, milk, yogurt, or other liquid; and salt, and then thoroughly rolled into flattened dough. Many flatbreads are unleavened, although some are leavened, such as pizza and pita bread. Flatbreads ...

. He had thought that busy Berlin workers might like a portable meal. Though he did not become wealthy from his widely imitated shop, Nurman later said he was happy that so many Turkish people were able to make a living selling kebabs. At the time of his death, there were approximately 16,000 döner outlets in Germany, with over 2.5 billion euros ($3.3 billion) in annual sales.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nurman, Kadir 1933 births 2013 deaths Turkish chefs Turkish restaurateurs Turkish emigrants to Germany Businesspeople from Istanbul