Paratha roll
street food of Pakistan

Roll paratha or paratha roll (Urdu: رول پراٹھا) is a popular Pakistani street food that is similar to shawarma. Roll paratha is a paratha, a crispy oily flatbread, rolled around meat pieces or kebab, vegetables, and sauces. While any choice of meat may be used, the most popular is chicken.
The dish originated in and is a specialty of Karachi.
Origins
The dish can be traced back to the 1970s in the city of Karachi, Pakistan when Hafiz Habib ur Rehman first created it out of necessity while serving a customer at Silver Spoon Snack, his Karachi restaurant. Normally he would serve a paratha and a kebab together on a plate with traditional sauce. However, one day a customer in a hurry asked him to pack the paratha and kebab. Rehman rolled the kebab inside the paratha, wrapped it in wax paper, and handed it over to the customer. Another customer witnessing it asked for the same parcel, and Rehman made it a regular offering. He developed a following for the dish by handing them out free with other orders and to passersby.
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Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q125700998. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Paratha roll” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.