When it comes to enjoying local cuisine on your trip to Athens, Greece, there are two ways to try one of the region’s favorite traditional snacks, gyros. Typically available in a sandwich or wrapped in a pita, gyros originated in Athens in the early 1900s and were already a popular fast food in the 1960s.
In Greek, “gyroscope” means “wound,” which is where this Greek dish gets its name. Although the term originally referred to chicken, pork or lamb intestines that were rolled around a spit and roasted on a spit, it has since been used in Greece to refer to sandwiches or any style of roast prepared with meat.
The gyros sandwich or gyros pita is the number of travelers who will find gyros in Greece. These sandwiches are made in one of two ways: both are served on pita bread with a dash of white garlic tzatziki sauce, a few tomato slices, and a few onion slices. Gyros can also refer to almost any type of meat on a rotisserie, cooked until crisp on the outside, then cut or delivered into chunks on a plate; vegetables are sometimes skewered with the meat, making it similar to a “shish kabob.”
Get a Gyros Sandwich in Greece
Note that the gyroscope is not pronounced like a “gyroscope” but more like “year-oh,” so if you order one when you’re out and about, you’ll want to make sure you say it correctly. Gyros pita sandwiches are typically served in small specialty shops in many of the major cities in Greece that offer takeout, but are also on the menu of some restaurants and taverns. Occasionally mass market pita stores like Quick Pita will charge an additional table fee if you don’t bring it to go.
Sandwich gyros are made in one of two ways. It can be sliced from a cone of ground beef (typically a combination of lamb and beef), mixed with spices, and formed into a slowly rotating cylindrical shape on a vertical spit on a rotisserie, crisping up the outer layer. On the other hand, gyros can be made from precooked pork slices assembled into a cylindrical shape and finished by turning on a vertical spit until the outer layer is crisp.
Both versions are generally served with pita bread, which is about the only time you’ll find this Middle Eastern bread in Greece. Some places serve it with fries, which are often placed directly on the pita, and the whole thing is served wrapped in a waxy paper. You’ll want to grab a lot of napkins if you’re bringing your sandwich to go, as this paper is unsuitable for keeping juices and tzatziki sauces from dripping down your chin and hands.
History of the gyroscope in Greece
Gyroscopes are a relatively new concept in Greece and other parts of the world. The vertically roasting meat technique used in gyros was originally discovered in Bursa by the Turks in the 19th century Ottoman Empire when they cooked lamb in what is known as doner kebabs.
After WWII, immigrants from Anatolia and the Middle East brought this food to Athens, where chefs developed their own variation of the style, adding onions and other vegetables to the mix, which eventually became known as gyros.
Just under 20 years later, gyros had already spread to the cities of Chicago and New York in the United States, and in the mid-1970s, John Garlic opened the first mass-produced gyro plant in Milwaukee, Minnesota. . to Gyros, Inc in Chicago.
You can likely find gyros in Greek restaurants around the world, but you can also find the street cart style service in major US cities like Philadelphia, Austin, and Atlanta.
