Thursday, lunchtime. Sitting on a bleacher at the northwest corner of the Halifax Common, Lindsay Wickstrom -- with a certain reverence for a movement she has performed hundreds of times before — pares back her tinfoil wrapper.
There are multiple ways to eat Halifax’s official dish, the donair: with the sauce on the side, open-faced with knife and fork, or just by pulling out the strips of meat with your fingers.
“The traditional way is to peel back the foil and eat it like an ice-cream cone,” the author of the newly published Book of Donair: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Halifax Food that became Canada's favourite kebab, said, doing just that to an offering from nearby Tony’s Donair.
That technique, she explained, is what Peter Gamoulakos told people to do, around the time when he was selling Canada’s first donair at Velos Souvlakia in Bedford in 1974.
To Gamoulakos, who was born in a small village just outside of Sparta, it was a Greek gyro. And they were significantly smaller than the mammoth mounds of meat, tomato, onion, and sauce enveloped in a pita, for sale at most modern donair shops.
“People told me that they would eat several in a sitting,” she said of the donair’s early days in this city.
I was around back then and do recall when dancing and dining meant the Piccadilly disco, followed by a late-night visit to one of the city’s few donair shops near the corner of Spring Garden Road and South Park Street.
My memory was that they were small enough to eat two at a time, while seated on the wall in front of the Convent of the Sacred Heart.
The recollection, truthfully, is a bit hazy, as it so often is, concedes Wickstrom, for those who partake in the street food she calls “our Philly cheese-steak, our poutine,” which can still happen late at night, after an evening in Halifax’s grog houses.
Her first exposure to the donair was inside her doctor’s office after he had just eaten one for lunch. “The smell just permeated the office,” she said. “I didn’t know what it was. I started crying. It was just awful.”
Before she ate a donair, Wickstrom made one at her first job working at Big Red’s pizza parlour in Lunenburg, where the Halifax-born woman grew up.
But her first glimpse of the dish’s transportive power was at age 17, when she and a boyfriend visited Charlie’s Pizza, just outside of Bridgewater.
She doesn’t recall much about the taste.
“I more remember watching him eating it and the effects it was having on him as he ate it,” she recalled. “Everything from his eyes rolling back in pleasure to his belly sticking out to falling asleep. It was just a whole out-of-body experience.”
In truth, Wickstrom’s donair obsession didn’t really begin until 2009 after a backpacking trip across Canada awakened her interest in the regional differences in food in this country.
“They are divisive, people love them or hate then,” Wickstrom, creator of the Eat This Town blog, said of donairs. “Some people grew up with them and there is a certain level of nostalgia for them. Others come here from different parts of Canada and just don’t get it.”
Her book, published by MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc., is the culmination of a quest to get to the root of the enduring popularity of a dish around which legends swirl.
Some facts, in her view, are indisputable. Since 2015 — the year of the first downtown Halifax Donair Crawl, the same year Halifax council voted to designate it as the city’s official food — the dish has undergone a “renaissance,” due in part to the way that Millennials have been eschewing fine dining for comfort food.
Who can argue with that? In this city — and perhaps also in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec where the donair fever has now also spread — a person can eat a donair sub and pizza, buy donair eggrolls, poutine, and tacos.
Thursday, sitting at mid-day in the middle of the city, Wickstrom spoke glowingly of the donair tartare that has sometimes appeared on the menu at the Stubborn Goat, and with more amusement than anything else about a donair cheesecake that, during a long-ago donair crawl, was available at the Sweet Hereafter cheesecake shop.
People look for donairs now when they visit Halifax, she said. Eager to accommodate, the restaurants, like Tony’s, are freshening up their interiors to make them more tourist-friendly.
None of this surprises her. She ate a lot of donairs during the research and writing of this book.
When I ask if she’s still fond of them now that the book is done, Wickstrom said, “I might have three in a day, then I might not have one for two weeks.”
Which I choose to take as a yes.
Lindsay's favourite donairs at the moment
1) Randy’s Pizza: Randy’s has so far proven to be the most consistently gratifying heavy-hitter of a donair. The donairs are hefty, meaty, spicy, and saucy with perfect pita treatment on the grill. It satisfies the soul on a very primal level.
2) Tony’s Donair: I like a Tony’s donair when I want something a little more manageable. The pita isn’t too greasy, and the expertly sliced meat is tucked into the pita’s warm embrace. You can actually pick it up to eat it. The meat is fairly spicy and the sauce is pretty sweet, but the flavours are well balanced compared to some of the competitors.
3) Euro Pizza: Euro uses the original (Mr. Donair) meat and traditional recipe sauce, in a perfect package of careful proportions. What really makes it special is the house-baked pita bread. If you don’t like donair sauce, the tzatziki (made daily from house-made yogurt) is to die for.
4) Revana Pizza: Revana was the first Dartmouth donair shop and it’s a classic. I like an open-faced donair accompanied by a cold beer at Whiskeys (the neighbouring dive bar, serviced by Revana’s kitchen). This is the perfect option for those who don’t like getting their hands dirty, as it is served on an actual plate with metal cutlery.
5) Elmsdale Pizzeria: I was really impressed by the donair at Elmsdale, which demonstrated expertise in pita and sauce techniques. The meat is made in-house by Mike (of Bailey’s Meats) who supplies a handful of restaurants in the province with his classic donair meat.
6) Jaco’s Donair: Jaco (a self-proclaimed “donair warrior”) makes the best donair in Saint John, which also happens to be one of the best donairs I’ve ever had. He attributes much of its appeal to his special “Jaco’s blend” meat that he sources from Bonté Foods.
7) Swiss Donair: Edmonton gets a lot of criticism for its lettuce and tzatziki donairs, but I was pleasantly surprised by Swiss Donair’s tightly wrapped donairs with fresh crunchy lettuce, served in combos with fries and pop. I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, but the familiar flavours created the impression that I could click my heels three times and I would be back in Halifax.
