Bold innovation marks the Great British Doner in Manchester

As part of our restaurant food tour of Manchester, we decided to visit this up-and-coming doner kebab restaurant.

Multi-award winning GBD

Great British Doner (GBD) is a multi-award winning brand that was first launched in 2025 by Turkish-born restaurateur Mehmet Nezir Korkut.

The site we visited was GBD’s double-storey flagship store in Deansgate to try what they call their “next-generation” kebab concept.

With a smaller site located in Manchester’s Piccadilly, they also have another two in Liverpool, which includes an express store.

Great British Doner’s flagship store in Manchester’s Deansgate

Having “place[d] technology at the centre of our operations”, this particular venue has plenty of seating both upstairs and down, with convenient self-ordering kiosks.

Using “authentic shish doner”, they have “invest[ed] heavily in product development” as part of an “approach [] built around consistency, quality, and modern hospitality”, which includes having developed one of Britain’s “first vegan shish doner concepts”.

And it appears that their efforts have been acknowledged, with GBD’s vegan product not only being “Peta-approved” after winning the Peta Vegan Food Award last year, but also being awarded “Best Vegan Kebab” at this year’s British Kebab Awards.

Vegan Doner Box – Plant-based doner, choice of salad & 2 vegan sauces

Let’s kick things off with GBD’s award-winning “100% plant-based doner” that’s grilled, before being sliced by their use of an automated kebab cutter.

This box comes loaded with the following five salads: lettuce, red cabbage, white cabbage, onion, and pickled cucumber, as well as two vegan-based sauces from any eight.

Served on a bed of fries, rice, or tortilla, the vegan meat had a strange texture which took some getting used to.

While all the other condiments being good enough, the faux meat had a firm almost springy texture. Would we order it in place of the real thing? No.

Mixed Doner Wrap – Beef & chicken, tortilla, choice of 5 salads & 2 signature sauces

Vegan has to get much better than the above to compete against the real thing, because there’s no substitute for either beef or chicken.

And when both are combined; well, there’s simply no contest, with the juicy meat all mixed in with the salads and sauces, and all wrapped in a toasted bread.

Freshly-made crêpe using GBD’s innovative ice cream doner

To our pleasant surprise, however, this ice cream doner is where GBD’s innovation actually worked.

It may look somewhat gimmicky, with the striped slab of frozen ice cream hung up to mimic a doner kebab.

And though the quality of the ice cream was average, when brought together in the form of freshly-made crêpe, this was decent.

What’s also surprising is why this hasn’t been replicated by other businesses. Maybe it’s just a matter of time.

Turkish Baklawa

Standard baklawa in a box to finish off proceedings at this Turkish-inspired, fast food doner restaurant.