Long Island restaurants that serve gyros

Shortly after man discovered fire — probably by dinnertime that same day — he came up with the idea of threading meat onto a branch and roasting it over the flames. Over the ensuing hundreds of thousands of years, that branch evolved into a metal spit, and eventually into a mechanical device, the horizontal rotisserie.

Our story begins when someone took that horizontal spit and rotated it 90 degrees so the pieces of meat formed an upright column and the heat source wasn’t under the spit, but flanked the length of it. 

Thus was born the Mediterranean specialty variously known as gyros, shawarma and doner kebab. Throughout Greece and Turkey, Israel and the Middle East, countless meals and snacks start with a man slicing meat off that rotating column and laying it, along with various vegetables and sauces, atop a waiting piece of bread. 

On Long Island, meat sliced off a vertical spit is usually known as gyros, its Greek name. (Language note: The word is singular — one gyros — and is correctly pronounced “yee-ros” not “ji-roz.”) The dish was born in the town of Bursa in what is now Turkey. 

He who first spun the meat

“Most dishes evolve, they very rarely get invented,” said Clifford Wright, author of the celebrated reference cookbook “A Mediterranean Feast” (William Morrow, 1999). “But in the case of vertical-spit-roasted meat, it really does seem to have been invented in Bursa in the mid 19th century.” 

There’s a family in Bursa, Wright said, whose ancestor, Iskender Efendi, wrote in the late 19th century that he and his grandfather, Haci Iskender, created doner kebab (literally “turning meat”). In those pre-electricity, pre-gas days, Wright said, the grill “would have had little shelves to hold hot coals.”

To this day, the Iskender family operates a chain of restaurants in Turkey, all of which, according to iskender.com, serve doner kebab made with “yearling lamb and suckling veal, lamb escalope and Iskender meat ball.” And the world over, “Iskender kebab” refers to a dish of lamb doner kebab with tomato sauce, yogurt and butter served on pieces of pita bread to soak up all the juices.

From Bursa, doner kebab spread all over Anatolia and throughout the Ottoman Empire. When it got to the Middle East, it was renamed shawarma, an Arabic transliteration of the Turkish cevirme, “turning.” In Greece, it was renamed gyros, Greek for “turn.” Arab immigrants even brought the dish to Mexico, where, eventually, the lamb got swapped out for pork, corn tortillas replaced the bread and the whole works was garnished with pineapple and dubbed taco al pastor (shepherd-style). 

In America, doner kebab and shawarma stayed pretty true to their Mediterranean roots. Long Island is home to dozens of Turkish restaurants, almost of all of which make doner the old-fashioned way: seasoning slices of lamb and beef and then stacking them, by hand, on the spit. Middle Eastern restaurants here are rarer, but from Lawrence (the kosher Ahuva’s Grill Express) to Selden (the halal Kabobshak), the level of shawarma quality is high.

Greek gyros, however, hit the big time, which inevitably led to mass production. Today there are a handful of national gyros manufacturers, most based in Chicago, that produce those ubiquitous columns of ground beef and lamb that spin at most casual Greek eateries. Their contents vary, but the ingredients of one popular brand include beef, lamb, water, soy protein concentrate, bread crumbs, onion, salt, monosodium glutamate and tricalcium phosphate.

The Greek Empire strikes back

When Tom and Gabriella Matheos opened Go Greek in Garden City a year ago, they dispensed with the “Greek mystery meat.” Tom had grown up in his parents’ restaurant, the Olympic Diner in Deer Park, but he left the fold to work at Chipotle. Over the course of his years at the chain (where he became a manager), he saw it was possible to run a successful restaurant that relied on freshly prepared foods. A frequent visitor to Greece, he also noted that Greek gyros had only the most superficial resemblance to ours. “Pork is the most common gyros meat there by far,” he said. “Lamb, they either roast in the oven or skewer for souvlaki.”

So from Day 1, Go Greek made its own pork gyros and chicken gyros, seasoning the meat and hand-stacking it on the spit. The initial customer reaction was not good. “A lot of people were dumbfounded,” Matheos recalled. “When they didn’t see the ground lamb-beef gyro, they’d point to what we had and say, ‘That’s not a gyro.’ ”

Matheos stuck to his guns and offered samples of “real” gyros to every customer. “Once they got a taste,” he said, “they’d say, ‘All right, give me that one.’ ” Now pork, the hardest sell, is neck-and-neck with chicken, and almost nobody asks anymore about lamb. 

Go Greek also makes gyros sandwiches the way it’s done in Greece: “We throw a few French fries on top — that takes the place of lettuce.” 

Greek restaurants that want to upgrade their gyros game have an alternative to making their own. About two years ago, Athens-based Megas Yeeros (the largest gyros producer in Europe) set up shop in New Jersey and is now supplying pork, chicken and beef-and-lamb stacks using sliced whole-muscle meat. 

Megas Yeeros is distributed in the metropolitan area by Optima Foods, the Deer Park wholesale supplier to Greek restaurants and markets. Dimitrios Hadzipolihronis, vice president, said that while most of Optima’s gyros are still traditional ground-meat “cones,” Megas Yeeros sales are growing, “especially among newer establishments.” And he’s partial to what he calls “the stacked gyros.” “It’s closer to what they have in Greece,” he said, “it’s healthier, and to tell you the truth, it has more flavor.”

Here are eight Long Island spots where you can take meat for a spin.