Olympian Greek Souvlaki · South Pattaya
Souvlaki, gyros and kebab — what is the difference?
Updated 25 Jul 2026 · written at the grill
Souvlaki, gyros, doner, shawarma and shish kebab all involve meat and fire, and in most of the world the names have been swapped around until they mean almost nothing. Here is the honest version, written by a souvlaki grill in South Pattaya that only does one of the five.
The short answer
Souvlaki is meat cut into cubes, threaded onto a skewer and grilled over the flame. Gyros is meat stacked in a tall cone on a vertical rotating spit and shaved off in strips as the outside cooks. That is the whole difference: skewer against spit. Everything after that — the bread, the sauce, whether there are chips inside, the paper wrap — is regional decoration on top of those two cooking methods.
Doner kebab is the Turkish original of the vertical spit, and gyros is the Greek answer to it. Shawarma is the Levantine and Arab version of the same idea. Shish kebab is Turkish skewered meat, which makes it a first cousin of souvlaki rather than of gyros. Once you see that the whole family splits into two branches — things on sticks and things on spits — menu boards stop being confusing anywhere in the world.
Olympian sits on the stick branch. We grill skewers to order and we do not run a vertical spit, which is worth knowing before you walk over to 3rd Road hoping for shaved meat.
Souvlaki: what the word actually means
Souvlaki — σουβλάκι, soo-VLAH-kee — is a diminutive. The parent word is σούβλα (souvla), a long spit or skewer, the thing you turn a whole animal on. Add the diminutive ending and you get “little skewer.” The word describes the stick, not the sauce and not the bread.
The traditional cut is pork — shoulder or neck, the parts with enough fat to survive direct heat. Chicken is the common alternative, usually thigh or breast. The cubes are seasoned simply: olive oil, lemon, oregano, salt, pepper. There is no long list of ground spices, because the point of the dish is the taste of grilled meat, salt and acid rather than a spice blend. That restraint is the single biggest difference in flavour between a Greek skewer and a Middle Eastern one.
In Greece the same skewer reaches the table three ways. Naked on the stick with a slice of bread, which is how people eat standing up. As a plate — a merida — with the skewers laid out and sides alongside. Or pulled off the stick and rolled into warm pita as a wrap you can walk with. Olympian does the wrap and the plate; the menu page lists exactly what is on the board.
One confusion worth clearing up: in casual Greek speech, especially in Athens, “a souvlaki” has drifted into meaning any meat wrap at all. Order one in central Athens and you may well be handed a gyros in pita. That is slang overtaking the dictionary, not a change in what the word means.
Kalamaki, and why the north and south disagree
Because “souvlaki” got absorbed as the generic word for a wrap in southern Greece, Athenians needed a different word for the actual skewer. They use kalamaki — καλαμάκι, kah-lah-MAH-kee — literally “little reed.” So in Athens you ask for a kalamaki if you want the stick and a souvlaki if you want the wrap.
In Thessaloniki and the north, souvlaki still means the skewer, and if you want it wrapped you say so: souvlaki se pita, souvlaki in pita. Same food, different filing system. It is the kind of thing Greeks will argue about across a table for twenty minutes.
Small bonus: kalamaki is also the ordinary modern Greek word for a drinking straw. Ask for one in a cafe and nobody brings you meat.
Gyros: the vertical spit
Gyros — γύρος, YEE-ros — means “turn” or “circle,” the same root that gives English gyroscope. Thin slices of seasoned meat are stacked into a cone around a vertical rod, the rod turns in front of a grill, and the cook shaves the browned outer layer off with a long knife as it cooks. In Greece the meat is usually pork, sometimes chicken. Lamb gyros is largely a diaspora invention, common abroad and uncommon at home.
The vertical spit is a brilliant piece of engineering for a busy street. It cooks continuously, it produces crisp edges, it works with cheaper cuts, and it lets one person serve a queue without stopping. The trade-off is that the meat is committed to the fire before anyone orders it. The cone turns whether the shop is busy or empty, and what you get is the part that finished cooking a moment before you arrived rather than something started for you.
The history is straightforward: the vertical spit came to Greece through Asia Minor, spread as street food through the middle of the twentieth century, and got a Greek name that translates the Turkish one almost word for word. Doner means turning. Gyros means turning. Same machine, two languages.
Doner kebab, shawarma and shish kebab
Doner kebab
Turkish döner kebap: döner from the verb to turn, kebap meaning grilled meat. This is the ancestor of the whole vertical-spit family. Usual meats are lamb, beef, veal or chicken. In Turkey it is served in a half loaf (ekmek arası), on a plate with rice, or rolled in a thin dürüm flatbread. The version most of Europe now means by “kebab” — flat bread stuffed with shaved meat, shredded cabbage, salad and a squeeze of sauce — was worked out by Turkish cooks in Berlin in the 1970s. It is a genuinely good dish with its own history. It simply is not Greek.
Shawarma
Arabic, borrowed from the Turkish çevirme, again “turning.” The Levantine branch. Chicken, or beef and lamb, marinated with a completely different palette: cardamom, cinnamon, allspice, clove, sumac, sometimes vinegar. It is rolled in very thin flatbread, closer to a crepe than to a Greek pita, and dressed with garlic paste or sesame sauce, pickles and sometimes chips. Lebanese chicken shawarma with toum and pickled turnip tastes nothing like a Greek pork gyros, even though the spit is the same shape.
Shish kebab
Turkish şiş kebap, where şiş means skewer. Cubes of meat on a stick over coals. Structurally this is the same dish as souvlaki, and the differences are all in the seasoning and what comes underneath: yogurt marinades, pepper paste, sumac onions, rice or lavash rather than lemon, oregano and pita. Worth knowing that adana and urfa kebab are minced meat pressed onto flat skewers, not cubes, so they are a third thing again.
If you like keeping score: skewers are souvlaki, kalamaki and shish. Spits are gyros, doner and shawarma. The Greek food glossary has the rest of the vocabulary.
The bread is half the argument
Most disappointing “Greek” wraps fail on bread rather than meat. Greek pita for souvlaki — πίτα, PEE-tah — is a soft, thickish, round flatbread with no pocket. It is brushed with oil and warmed on the grill or a flat plate until it blisters a little and turns pliable, almost floppy. You do not cut it open. You lay the meat and sauce along it, roll it into a cone and twist paper around the bottom so it holds.
The hollow pocket bread sold as “pita bread” in supermarkets is a Middle Eastern bread that happens to share the name. It is drier, thinner and built to be split and stuffed. Put souvlaki in it and the bread cracks, the tzatziki runs out of the bottom and the whole thing eats like a sandwich rather than a wrap. If a shop hands you a split pocket, they have used the wrong bread.
The other breads in the family: Turkish doner uses lavash, dürüm or a quarter loaf. Shawarma uses markook or saj bread, thin enough to see light through. Greek pita is the softest and the thickest of the three, which is why it can carry a wet sauce like tzatziki without falling apart — but only while it is warm. That is also why a pita wrap is best eaten within minutes, something worth reading before you order it for delivery.
Sauces: tzatziki, tahini and toum
Tzatziki — τζατζίκι, dzah-DZEE-kee — is strained yogurt, cucumber grated and squeezed dry, garlic, olive oil and salt. Some cooks add dill, some a splash of vinegar. It should be thick enough to sit on a spoon, cold, sour and properly garlicky. Its job in a wrap is to cool the grilled meat and carry the garlic through it. Turkish cacık is a relative, but thinner — often a cold soup or a drink. Indian raita is a cousin from further east.
Tahini sauce is sesame paste loosened with lemon juice and water until it turns pale and pourable. Nutty, slightly bitter, no dairy at all. Levantine.
Toum is a Lebanese emulsion of garlic, lemon and oil whipped until it looks like mayonnaise. It is ferociously garlicky and, again, contains no dairy.
So: yogurt is Greek, sesame is Levantine, whipped garlic is Lebanese. When a shop offers “gyros with garlic sauce” and the sauce is white and glossy rather than thick and flecked with cucumber, you are eating something from a different tradition. At Olympian the tzatziki is the thing early reviewers keep mentioning, and it comes in the wraps as well as on its own. Because it is yogurt-based it contains dairy, which matters if you are vegan — see the dietary page.
Athens puts chips in the pita. Thessaloniki does not.
This is the argument Greeks actually have, and it decides what your wrap looks like.
The Athenian and southern build puts a handful of fried potatoes inside the pita along with the meat, tzatziki, tomato and onion, and often a stripe of mustard or ketchup. Southerners will tell you the chips are structural: they soak up juice, they add texture, they make the wrap a full meal.
The Thessaloniki and northern build leaves the potatoes out. Meat, tzatziki, tomato, onion, sometimes parsley, and that is the wrap. If you want chips you order chips, on the side, where they stay crisp. Northerners will tell you that potatoes sealed inside a warm pita steam themselves soft within a minute and turn the whole thing stodgy.
Yannis Pagiannidis is from Thessaloniki, so Olympian builds it the northern way. What you get is a wrap that is about the meat and the sauce, not about filler — the owner page explains why that is a deliberate choice rather than an omission. If you have only ever had the Athenian version, the northern one tastes cleaner and more of the grill.
How to say all of it
Stress in capitals. Nobody at a Greek counter minds a wrong guess, but these help.
Side by side
| Name | How it is cooked | Usual meat | Usual bread | Classic sauce | Home |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Souvlaki / kalamaki | Cubes on a hand-held skewer, grilled to order | Pork, chicken | Soft unpocketed Greek pita, oiled and grilled | Tzatziki | Greece |
| Gyros | Stacked cone on a vertical spit, shaved as it cooks | Pork, chicken | Soft unpocketed Greek pita | Tzatziki | Greece |
| Doner kebab | Stacked cone on a vertical spit | Lamb, beef, veal, chicken | Half loaf, lavash or dürüm | Garlic or chilli sauce, yogurt | Turkey |
| Shawarma | Stacked cone on a vertical spit | Chicken, beef, lamb | Very thin saj or markook flatbread | Toum or tahini | Levant |
| Shish kebab | Cubes on a skewer over coals | Lamb, beef, chicken | Lavash, or rice instead of bread | Yogurt, sumac onions | Turkey |
Read the first and second columns together and the family tree is obvious. Souvlaki and shish are the same technique with different seasoning. Gyros, doner and shawarma are the same machine with different spice cupboards.
Why a lot of “gyros” around Pattaya is really doner
A vertical spit is a standard piece of catering equipment sold worldwide, and the pre-formed meat cones that go on it are a global product. The mainstream versions of those cones are seasoned in the Turkish and Middle Eastern style, and they are almost never pork, because most of that supply chain is built for markets where pork is not eaten. So the default cone available to a shop in Thailand is chicken or beef, spiced the Anatolian way.
That means you can order something labelled gyros and receive: chicken or beef shaved off a spit, in a thin tortilla-style wrap, with garlic mayonnaise, shredded cabbage and a squeeze of chilli sauce or ketchup. Every one of those choices is a doner choice. It can be a very good doner. It is not a Greek gyros, which would normally be pork, seasoned with oregano and paprika, on a thick soft Greek pita, with tzatziki, tomato and onion.
None of this is a complaint about anyone else’s cooking, and we are not naming shops. It is just the reason people who grew up in Greece often come away from a “gyros” abroad feeling that something was missing. Usually two things were: the pork and the bread.
What Olympian actually does, plainly
Olympian is a souvlaki grill. Pork or chicken, cut, skewered and grilled when you order. There is no vertical spit on the premises and nothing is shaved. If your heart is set on shaved meat off a rotating cone, this is the wrong counter and we would rather say so on a web page than have you find out standing in front of it.
What you get instead is the trade the northern Greek grill has always made: the food is started when you ask for it, so at a busy moment you wait, and in exchange nothing has been sitting under a lamp. Pork or chicken in warm pita with tzatziki, tomato and onion. Double pita if you are hungry. Plates if you would rather have the skewers laid out. One vegetarian option made fresh at the counter — ask when you order. Tzatziki on its own, which a lot of people do.
Everything is on the menu page, the shop is on South Pattaya Road in front of Tony’s Fitness, hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 15:00–23:00, and you can call +66 86 061 8843 or order on Grab. More background on Greek souvlaki in Pattaya, and anything else in the FAQ.
Frequently asked questions
Is souvlaki the same as a gyro?
No. Souvlaki is cubed meat grilled on a skewer. Gyros is meat stacked on a vertical rotating spit and shaved off in strips. They are both Greek, they often go into the same pita with the same tzatziki, but they are two different cooking methods. Olympian grills skewers and does not run a spit.
Is a doner kebab the same as a gyros?
Almost, technically. Both are vertical-spit dishes and the Greek name is a direct translation of the Turkish one. What differs is the meat and the seasoning — Greek gyros leans on pork, oregano and paprika with tzatziki on Greek pita, while doner leans on lamb, beef or chicken with a Turkish spice profile in lavash or a half loaf.
What does souvlaki mean?
“Little skewer.” It is the diminutive of σούβλα (souvla), the long spit used for large cuts. The word describes the stick, which is why it can be served on a plate or in pita and still be souvlaki.
What is kalamaki?
The Athenian word for the skewer itself, literally “little reed.” Southern Greece drifted into using “souvlaki” for any meat wrap, so it needed a separate word for the stick. In Thessaloniki and the north, souvlaki still means the skewer.
Why is there no vertical spit at Olympian?
Because a spit has to be loaded and cooking before anyone orders. A skewer grill starts when you ask. That costs you time at a busy moment and buys meat that has not been held hot.
Does the pita have chips inside?
Not here. Chips inside the pita is the Athenian and southern Greek style. Yannis is from Thessaloniki, where the wrap is meat, tzatziki, tomato and onion, and potatoes are a side rather than a filling.
Is Greek pita the same as the pocket pita from the supermarket?
No, and this is the most common mix-up. Greek souvlaki pita is soft, thicker and has no pocket. It is oiled and warmed on the grill until pliable, then rolled around the filling. Pocket bread is a different Middle Eastern bread that shares the name.
How do you pronounce gyros?
YEE-ros. The Greek gamma before a front vowel is close to an English y, so it is not “jai-ro” or “guy-ros.” The s belongs to the word, so “a gyro” is an English back-formation.
Is shish kebab closer to souvlaki or to gyros?
To souvlaki. Shish means skewer in Turkish, so it is the same technique — cubes on a stick over coals. The differences are marinade and accompaniment rather than method.
What sauce goes on a real souvlaki?
Tzatziki: strained yogurt, grated and squeezed cucumber, garlic, olive oil and salt. Tahini sauce and Lebanese toum belong to the shawarma tradition, not the Greek one.