Kebapçı İskender

İSKENDER is a brand that was born and made famous by the kindness of the people of Bursa. Our story begins in the late 19th century in the shop of İskender Efendi, son of Mehmet, in the Bursa Kayhan Bazaar.

In those days, lamb was cooked whole and parallel to the ground. However, İskender Efendi began to look for a solution to ensure that the unique flavours of the different parts of the lamb were evenly distributed to his customers. Based on this idea, İskender Efendi, who came from a family of butchers who were masters at cooking meat, with the support of his father Mehmet Efendi, cleaned the meat of bones and nerves, put it on a spit and cooked it vertically in front of a charcoal fire, then sliced it thinly and presented it. This different presentation attracted a lot of attention in Bursa and became known as İskender Efendi’s ‘rotating kebab’. In those years, Bursa’s population was very small and the city consisted of the Kayhan-Tahtakale-Reyhan triangle and neighbourhoods such as Maksem and Tophane. People knew each other. Initially known as a “spinning kebab”, the dish gradually became known in the vernacular as “Döner Kebab” and later simply as “Döner”, and the nickname became a signboard and then a commercial title in today’s commercial environment, as Mehmet oglu İskender Efendi. Thus was born a brand that has endured for 150 years and has become a symbol of Bursa. Today, Kebapçı Iskenderoglu continues to serve with the same meticulousness.