The Kebab Map of Turkey: Which City Does What

Outside Turkey, kebab means meat in bread. Inside Turkey it is a category, roughly the way "pasta" is a category in Italy, and most of the versions are named after the place that made them famous. Order an Adana in Erzurum and you will get something perfectly good. Order it in Adana and you will understand why it has a name.

Here is the map.

Adana and Urfa: the same skewer, two heat levels

Adana kebabı is hand-minced lamb pressed onto a wide flat skewer, seasoned with red pepper, and grilled over charcoal. It is spicy, and it is supposed to be.

Urfa kebabı is the same preparation without the heat. Not a lesser version: a different one, built so that the meat and the fat do the talking.

Both come with grilled tomato and long green peppers, flatbread underneath to catch the fat, raw onion with sumac, and ayran. Eat it the local way: tear bread, lay on meat, add onion, fold.

Gaziantep: the sophisticated one

Gaziantep is the serious food city of Turkey, a UNESCO City of Gastronomy, and its kebabs are more varied than anywhere else.

• Ali Nazik, grilled meat over smoked aubergine beaten with garlic yoghurt. If you order one thing in Antep, order this.
• Simit kebabı, minced meat with bulgur worked through it.
• Patlıcan kebabı, alternating meatballs and aubergine on the skewer, so the aubergine takes the fat as it cooks.

Antep sits on our Southeastern Anatolia tour, which is the practical way to eat your way across this region rather than flying in for a weekend.

Bursa: İskender

Thin slices of döner laid over cubes of pide bread, covered in tomato sauce, with yoghurt beside it and hot butter poured over at the table. Rich, and designed to be.

Bursa claims both İskender and a central role in the invention of vertical döner. The claim is contested, the kebab is not.

Erzurum: cağ kebabı

The most interesting kebab in Turkey and the least known abroad. Marinated lamb is stacked on a horizontal spit over wood, cooked slowly, then sliced off onto small skewers and brought to you still on them.

It is essentially döner before döner stood up, and in Erzurum people eat it for breakfast. Worth planning a stop for.

Cappadocia: testi kebabı

Meat and vegetables sealed inside a clay pot and cooked slowly, then the pot is cracked open at your table, usually with some ceremony.

Honest note: the theatre is now more reliable than the cooking. In a good restaurant it is excellent. In a tourist restaurant it is a stew in a broken jug. Ask locally rather than following the biggest sign.

Elsewhere, briefly

How to order well

• Look for an ocakbaşı. A long charcoal grill with seats around it. You can see what is happening and the meat goes straight from fire to plate.
• Eat early. The best kebab places in the southeast sell out. Lunch, not a late dinner.
• Say no to the extra starters if you want to. The mezze arriving unordered is normal; you pay for what you eat, and you may send back what you do not touch.
• Drink ayran, not cola. Salted yoghurt against charcoal fat is the whole point.
• Ask for az acılı if you want it milder, or acısız for none.

And the thing that surprises most visitors: the bread matters as much as the meat. A kebab place that bakes its own flatbread is telling you something about the rest of the kitchen. We go further into regional cooking and the long table it belongs to in our writing on what gets served around it.