France Has Its Very Own College Dedicated Entirely to Kebab-Making

Culinary schools come in many different forms: generalist culinary institutions are commonplace, ditto for specialist pastry schools. Extra-specialized schools have even cropped up, from Enzo Coccia’s Neapolitan pizza college to McDonalds’ Hamburger University in Illinois, which offers degrees in Hamburgerology. And here’s one more hyper-niche educational facility to add: France’s Kebab Academy, which offers a diploma qualifying graduates as a “master kebab-maker,” or maître kebabiste.

The company France Kebab, which makes supermarket-bought kebab kits, is behind the school, located in the Normandy city of Saint-Lô. Per radio station Nova, the Academy’s flagship program in kebabery (or shawarma-ology, if you will) entails 14 hours of practical workshops, and 11 hours of theory.

It’s unclear what constitutes “kebab theory” — a cursory search shows that it’s not a well-established discipline, and could merely be a creation of France Kebab.

To be fair, the diploma isn’t solely about kebab-making — according to the Academy, the kebabiste training teaches students about starting and running a business, as well as instructing them in hygienic food handling guidelines. Then the practical side gets into best practices and recipes for making shawarma — meat prep, seasoning, cooking, slicing, the whole caboodle.

Worried about paying the tuition to get yourself or your kids that valuable Kebab Science diploma? Not to worry: there’s even a range of financing options available, courtesy of the French government and various training centers (although mercifully, the debt burden for a major in kebab engineering is pretty light, as the courses only last a few days).

Unsure on whether to enroll? Here’s a promotional video with the low-down (in French, obviously).

• Kebab Academy [Official]
• À la Kebab Academy, des stages pour devenir Maître kebabiste [Nova]
• All France coverage [E]