A street-food staple is arriving on four wheels this weekend.
After a test launch at last year’s Christkindlmarket in Civic Center park drew masses to his stand, Denver-via-Athens resident Nikolas Diamantopoulos has started a food truck called Berliner Haus. It is centered around döner kebabs, Turkish sliced-meat sandwiches that are enormously popular as street food in Germany and other parts of Europe.
The food truck will make its debut Friday evening during the monthly First Friday events in the Art District on Santa Fe; it will be located at Santa Fe Drive and West 9th Avenue. Diamantopoulos will be outside of Zuni Street Brewing Company, at 2355 W. 29th Ave., on Saturday afternoon and at the Sterling Ranch housing development in Littleton on Sunday afternoon.
While there are plenty of the similar Greek-style gyros in Denver, Diamantopoulos doesn’t know of any other places that sell his kind of döner kebabs, even in German restaurants, which focus on serving traditional cuisine like cabbage rolls, sausages, schnitzels and pretzels.
Berliner Haus was right at home at Christkindlmarket, a German holiday market organized by the state chapter of the German American Chamber of Commerce. Now, Diamantopoulos will have to introduce the meal to the rest of the city.
“We’ve always thought of kebabs as shish kebabs,” Diamantopoulos said about the U.S. “That is not what a döner kebab is.”
A döner kebab consists of pide, a Turkish flatbread, cut open and filled with sliced meat, salad and one, or a mix of, sauces. Like gyros, the meat is beef, lamb, chicken or, as is popular in Germany, veal. It is roasted on a spit and shaved into thin layers that are then piled inside.
“Döner” means “rotating” in Turkish. It was the waves of immigrants from Turkey to Germany in the 1960s and ’70s who developed döner kebabs, combining the pide, meats, chopped-up veggies and the sauces, which come in garlic “white” and red “chile” varieties.
Stands are all over Berlin, which Diamantopoulos first visited as a teenager living in Athens, Greece. He said he and a high-school friend spent most of the trip “skating and eating German street food.”
Diamantopoulos departed for Boulder at 18 to attend college but later relocated to Denver, working as a bartender and in other food-industry jobs, as well as with his own home-theater installation company. He still visits Berlin to see friends, he said.
At Berliner Haus, he’ll make a döner kebab with beef and lamb, another with chicken, and one for vegetarians. Instead of pide, he can wrap the inside in dürüm, another Turkish flatbread. The döner kebab contents can also come on top of fries, rice and salad.
The food truck won’t be equipped with a spit, since hotter temperatures during the summer and the size of the instrument pose safety issues, Diamantopoulos said. Instead, the meats are cooked on spits off-site and loaded onto the truck.
One Turkish restaurant with three locations in the metro, Istanbul Café & Bakery, bills a döner sandwich on a baguette and a döner salad on its menu. But Diamantopoulos may be the only one dishing it the Berlin way, with the pide and sauces essential to the döner kebab experience.