Donairs are a delicacy prevalent on the Canadian east coast, centered in the City of Halifax.

The Taste of Montana’s take on the legendary Halifax donair consisting of thinly shaved slices of spiced beef laid on a warm pita, topped with diced onion and tomato, and finally, drizzled with the sweet garlicky sauce spiked with Arthur Wayne’s Habanero Hot Sauce. This delicious baby is not a gyro or shawarma but can be likened to meatloaf.

In this food instead of lamb, typical of gyro, the meat is made from a combination of ground beef and bread crumbs, spiced in various ways, and slow-roasted on a vertical spit. All the wonder flavors hinge on the sauce: a combination of evaporated milk, vinegar, sugar, and garlic (though the latter ingredient is contested among pizza shops. Yep I said Pizza. More on this later). Remember no tzatziki and certainly no lettuce or cucumber.

The pita never really holds all the donair deliciousness inside, so it could get somewhat messy, hence the tightly wrapped in tinfoil. There is an unspoken code among donair diners. No one ever looks good eating them, so no one judges you, even if you do have sauce drizzling down your chin. To be honest that should be the rule for any food.

Gorging the warm, supple, and meaty rich donair is a ritual that happens every weekend in downtown Halifax by late-night imbiber of the Halifax bar scene.
It starts around 2 in the morning, when bars start to close and throngs of people congregate at the downtown intersection of Blowers and Grafton Streets, better known as Pizza Corner, where they seek slices of pizza, subs, and above all else, donairs.

Basically, the donair is to Halifax what the banh mi is to Saigon, or the jambon-beurre to Paris. It is a quintessential Haligonian gastronomic experience best eaten late at night and on the street while freezing your ass off. It tastes sweet and savory, feels tasty and messy, but oh so perfect for all meat lovers.

To the uninitiated, the donair seems intimidating to make but not impossible. First, there is donair meat, heavily spiced ground beef that’s shaped into a large loaf and roasted on a spit, then shaved and seared on a flat top range. The meat is placed on a thin, Lebanese-style pita and topped with tomatoes and raw onions.

The donair sauce is an addictively sweet blend of evaporated milk, vinegar, garlic powder, and sugar. The sandwich is wrapped in tin foil and eaten out of hand. It gets a bit messy as the pita has a tendency to sop up the juices and sauces, making the bread fall apart, so you best eat it over a cardboard plate and as far away from your body and your nice shirt. In fact, show up wearing black so the food stains aren’t as big of an issue.

With Turkish, German, and Greek influences, the Halifax donair flagship dish has a murky but intriguing past echoing the multicultural landscape of Canadian cuisine … a delicious history beginning with the doner kebab, made in the 1950s by the owner of a Turkish kebab house in Berlin. Basically, this is the grandfather of all pita-dependent renditions like donair, gyro, shawarma, and even tacos el pastor.

After an influx of Turkish migrants, the doner kebab was invented in Germany around 1972 in a Berlin kebab house. It consisted of sliced lamb or beef with chopped lettuce, cabbage, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, and an array of sauces.

The gyro, Greece’s concurrent counterpart, evolved from the doner kebab as well, but after centuries of disputes between Greeks and Turks, the name was changed, eliminating Turkish influence from the cuisine. The gyro was popularized in New York and Chicago in the 1970s and consists of a loaf of ground beef and/or lamb served in a pita with tomatoes, onions, and tzatziki sauce.

Around the same time, Peter Gamoulakos opened Velos Pizza in Bedford, Nova Scotia with his sights set on a donair dynasty.

The Brothers of Donair

The birthplace of the donair, Velos Pizza, opened in the 1960s, but donair lore relays it was at the King of Donair on Quinpool Road in Halifax that Gamoulakos perfected the recipe in 1973. Similar to the Chinese restaurateurs who added sugar to their traditional dishes to cater to the North American palate, Gamoulakos altered his recipe for the typical Haligonian. He substituted doner kebab’s lamb for beef and made his own version of tzatziki by swapping out the yogurt for evaporated milk and adding sugar.

Together with his brother John Kamoulakos (their last names are different because of an immigration kerfuffle), King of Donair became the epitome of late-night indulging for Haligonians.

Nick Garonis purchased King of Donair in the 1980s and opened up a second location at the intersection of Blowers and Grafton Streets, which became the famous Pizza Corner, a Halifax institution. This is the place to go after a night of drinking for a slice or a donair. Pizza Corner’s late-night larder consisted of King of Donair, Sicilian Pizza, and The European Food Shop, which John Kamoulakos opened on his own in 1987. King of Donair went through several owners before relocating in 2012; there are now five locations across Halifax, and it’s the very donair Anthony Bourdain ate.

Today donair flavors became so popular that Chinese takeout joints serve donair egg rolls. Ontario-based chain Pizza Pizza had a donair recipe created for them when they branched out to Atlantic Canada. So donair pizza is actually a thing now up in America’s Hat.

Outside of the Maritimes, nostalgic diners like you and I have to be resourceful to get our fix. Today we took matters into their own hands and fine-tuned the recipe until we got the right mix for the “authentic” taste. Enjoy.