You are what you eat. Or, more accurately, you are what you eat for breakfast. A daring gastronome might down a few fried scorpions on an evening out, but few venture into the culturally unfamiliar with their morning coffee. Or so I thought until I found myself, early one morning, on a street corner in Diyarbakir, beside an open grill, unskewering wobbly bits of lamb innards onto a piece of bread and then smothering them in raw onions and pickled peppers far hotter than Peter Piper ever picked. Cartlak kebab or chargrilled liver is a southeastern speciality, and while you can eat it any time of day, it is particularly tasty when consumed in the place of bacon and egg. I repeated the experience to only mildly less satisfactory effect the next morning in Sanliurfa, at the Sevgi Ciger Salonu, where the kebab came with the yoghurt drink ayran, which is frothed in a bowl and served with a ladle. Sevgi, of course, means ‘love’, and the food arrives on heart-shaped metal plates. You can eat heart as well, along with kidney and ordinary shish, but I definitely draw the line at early-morning spleen. Somehow I preferred the food on the Diyarbakir sidewalk atÉwell, if the establishment has a name, it is probably the same as that of its proprietor, Erdal. The trick with liver, as it was explained to me, is to cut the pieces just the right size, so they cook thoroughly but don’t dry out. The difficult bit, however, is finding Erdal in the first place: walk along the inside of the city walls from the Harput Gate past the PTT and turn left when you see a crowd of men and a smoke trail. While it is an exaggeration to say that Diyarbakir is undergoing a renaissance, it is now a much more confident place, with several comfortable hotels. There is much to see in both the city itself and the region beyond. There is a tradition of eating in hotel dining rooms, which have the advantage of serving alcohol, as does the club (lokal) of the Chamber of Commerce, called Tüccarlar, which is up a flight from the office of the European Commission. The fare is pretty familiar: meze, kebabs, lots of cigarette smoke and the occasional chanteuse. Lebeni, however, is a brand-new restaurant in an old Diyabakir home of thick-walled rooms around a courtyard. It takes its name from a simple yoghurt soup thickened with kernels of wheat. Another seemingly simple but extremely tasty dish is turkey and rice. The village-reared turkey is braised overnight, then finished in the oven, and has a very concentrated flavour. There is also a rich lamb stew and saç kebab, or meat that has been braised then stir-fried and is served in a shallow sort of wok. One of the rooms in Lebeni has tables and chairs, but you have the option of sitting in what amounts to a private room on low divans and being served on a tray perched on a little stand. It might seem kitsch but it is actually relaxed and fun. We went back a second night. I am not a great fan of the long-standing Diyarbakir institution Salih Amca, which now sports two branches on the European and Asian sides of Istanbul. It is famous for just one dish: stuffed ribs of lamb. The ribcage is filled with rice, then sewn shut and braised. The waiter strips the meat onto the plate with all the flourish of his Chinese counterpart preparing a Peking duck. The rice doesn’t seem to absorb much flavour and the result is surprisingly bland. The hors d’oeuvres of stuffed lamb’s intestine (bumbar) is not worth the detour either. Only the içli köfte (dumplings of cracked wheat with a meat filling in this case boiled) inspire affection. Far superior is the Gazi Köskü, roughly translated as the ‘Mustafa-Kemal-Pasha-Slept-Here-Pavilion’ which is a very short drive out of town through the Mardin Gate. The pavilion is perched on a hillside with good views of the city and you can sit outside in good weather. A longish menu contains many unexpected dishes, including lamb cooked with quince, as well as pretty good kebabs. I had a cup of coffee but didn’t get to eat at Kamer Mutfagi a restaurant run by an organisation concerned with the plight of battered wives and women’s rights in the southeast. The proceeds of what seems a very pleasant dining room serving home-cooked regional dishes go to support their work. Even to mention Diyarbakir kebabs to a resident of Gaziantep is to invite ridicule. The basic components of Antep cuisine, as it is known pistachio-filled pastries and hand-chopped grilled meats are now popular throughout Turkey. Imam Çagdas is the city’s most famous kebab and baklava house, but we were recommended a restaurant away from the centre, on the edge of an industrial estate, where the bosses take their honoured guests. Küþleme has all the charm of a tidy truck stop but the food is fantastic. There’s a taxi driver in the film Desperately Seeking Susan who remarks that sushi isn’t so bad cooked it tastes just like fish. Similarly, simit kebab, which is cooked çigköfte the spicy raw meat kneaded with cracked wheat tastes just like köfte, only a great deal better. There is a lot of air in a good kebab the fat melts away and what remains is light and crusty. The exception is the eponymous küsleme entrecote of lamb. It’s not something a lamb has a lot of; it’s a thin strip of meat that is tender, with a slightly grassy taste. Dessert is havuç baklava so called because it is cut into havuç, or carrot-shaped slices. It is warmed in a tray over the coals and, despite all the butter and pistachio, you can fool yourself into believing it is airy and insubstantial. | Back in Istanbul I discovered one place serving küsleme, but there is so much else on offer you’d have to turn up every day for a month to sample it all. Çiya is less a restaurant than an ethnographic museum of Turkish cooking, with a score of dishes you would find nowhere else. It is not just one restaurant but three, all within a few metres of each other at the far end of Kadiköy fish market. What started as a kebab restaurant, with a few prepared trays of unusual regional home cooking, developed into a sanctuary for endangered recipes. I had never heard of, and still can’t find the English translation for, sevket-i bostan, a tuber from the Aegean region with a taste and texture close to an artichoke. Here it is braised with lamb. Then there are a garlicky leek called çiris, a stew made with unripe figs, fresh almond husks cooked in a stew, a savoury porridge of wheat and chicken. The menu changes all the time and even the kebabs are out of the ordinary. What’s unusual is not just the ingredients; the agents used to provide basic flavours such as hot, sweet or sour are not those you’d expect. In addition to lemon, there’s fresh sumac and kes a brick-hard dried yoghurt that gives a slightly sour, cheesy flavour to food and fruit to sweeten savoury dishes. At the very least there is a lack of pretension at Çiya. The dishes are on display in simmering trays, as in any lokanta. There is a salad bar of exotic herbs, and all the prices are perfectly reasonable. There’s no alcohol, but an appealing array of sherbets or squashes made from sumac or tamarind or carob, and the desserts are pretty good: walnuts, candied rather than pickled, with clove the list goes on and on and on. I was unprepared on my first visit and I have to confess that at first I found the idea of this diversity more appealing than the reality. And a lot of the dishes are quite sloppy you definitely need a spoon. Part of the problem is that the food is so unusual that it needs explanation. One solution is to consult in advance the well-designed website, www.ciya.com.tr, although it helps to know Turkish. Frankly, a menu would do. On the second trip I was more engaged, partly because I fell into conversation with the owner, Musa Dagdeviren. He comes from Nizip, outside Gaziantep, from where many of the dishes hail. He is clearly a man with his own vision and aesthetic, and Çiya is unique. A different aesthetic is on display at Tugra, the flagship Turkish restaurant of the Çiragan Palace Kempinski Hotel. You catch on immediately with the amuse-gueule that is really just a bit of vegetable soup with an intense flavour. We are being warned that this is not the ever-so-fashionable sun-dried taste of the ‘new Mediterranean cuisine’ but high-culture Turkish and Ottoman cuisine. Another clue is the name of the website of Tugra’s new chef, Aydin Demir: www.minimalistchef.com. Tugra’s menu is in two parts more familiar Turkish dishes and modern improvisations on Turkish and Ottoman themes. Again Demir works with gentle strokes. A pot-roast of veal is transformed with a suggestion of mastic in the sauce. Sole in a creamy mussel sauce would not have been out of place at Prunier’s. Centik kebab lamb and chicken on a bed of matchstick potatoes (what we used to call ‘pompa’) with a spicy sauce is one of the few dishes centred on an obviously Near Eastern tradition. As one would expect, there is great attention to detail vegetables elegantly presented, including swiss chard, a velvety alternative to spinach, alongside fish. The hors d’oeuvres, which include vegetables cooked in olive oil, and the sweet trolley contain some more mainstream Turkish dishes. The advantage of Tugra is that it is an opportunity to sample intelligent Turkish cuisine in the leisurely style of a grand hotel dining room rather than the eat-and-run atmosphere of a lokanta. The food, though, is not grandiose but aims at a sort of purity. The prices, needless to say, are a good deal higher than on a Diyarbakir street corner. Lebeni Diyarbekir Evi:
Cevatpasa Mah., Yardõmcð Sok 4
(Emek Sinemasõ Arkasõ),
Dörtyol, Diyarbakõr;
tel +90-412 228 5855. Kamer Mutfagõ:
Aliemir Cad, 3. Sok,
Yenisehir, Diyarbakõr. Tüccarlar: Diyarbakir Ticaretve Sanayi Odasi, Aliemiri Cad,
Diyarbakir. Küsleme:
Adana Asfalt Üzeri,
Koçerler Baspõnar BP Istayonu içi,
Gaziantep;
tel +90-342 337 2025. Imam Çagdas:
Eski Hal Civari,
Uzun Çarsi 14,
Gaziantep;
tel +90-342 231 2678. Çiya Sofrasi:
Caferaga Mah. Güneslibahçe Sk 43,
Kadiköy, Istanbul;
tel +90-216 330 3190;
www.ciya.com.tr. Tugra:
Çiragan Palace Kempinski,
Besiktas, Istanbul;
tel +90-212 258 3377. | Which wine?
By Hettie Judah With all the new and unfamiliar Turkish wines on offer these days, choosing from a restaurant’s wine list can be a gamble. Starting at the more affordable end, Yakut (red), and Çankaya (white) are Turkey’s fallback reliable table wines. Çankaya starts tasting vile once its temperature elbows its way too far above freezing, but served icy cold, or in a spritzer, this is fair game if you want to knock back something cold and quick on a hot day. If you can’t get it cold enough, drink the rosé, Lâl, instead; your dental enamel will thank you for it. Served chilly or agitated in any way, Yakut can be correspondingly rough on the palate; served with temperate calm, it is thin but consistent if you don’t have the budget to play around. The next notch up in price provides an almost negligible advance in taste, and the red and white offerings of both Angora and Villa Doluca will still provoke a sneeze if inferior wines have this effect on you. Villa Doluca has a slight edge. If you can bear the hike in price, opt for the next level in quality and go for Antik, which this year is disconcertingly good. The problem here is one of consistency, in that Antik seems to produce a disproportionate number of corked bottles. In good condition, the red is full, spicy and slightly tingly, reminiscent of a Syrah/Shiraz. The white is less special but light and easy, still a big improvement on those lower down the list. The big discovery at this level on the menu you won’t find it often is Doluca’s Moskado. Young and cold, it is a delicious medium-dry wine that tastes strongly of muscatel grapes. It suits all the spicier Southeast Asian elements now creeping onto chic Turkish restaurant menus. Drink it as you would a new-style Gewürtztraminer. At the next level up, you hit the old Turkish grape varieties that are undergoing a fashionable revival: in the reds, Öküzgözü, Bogazkere and Kalecikkarasi, and in the whites, Narince and Sultaniye. It is rare to find a menu offering single-variety wines; most will offer a blend of Öküzgözü and Bogazkere and a blended white that includes Narince. Of the reds, go for Doluca’s Özel Kav: full-bodied, with smooth tannins, it has been voted Turkey’s best wine. In the dry whites, if you are offered a straight Kavaklidere Narince, go for it, otherwise hit the Selection: a blend of Narince and Semillon not swoon-inducing, but actively pleasant. The big story in Turkish wine over the past few years has been the introduction of classic ‘noble’ grape varieties and New World methods. Production has now reached a level where they are sold in restaurants, but cheap they are not. To be fair, they probably cost about what one would pay in America for something similar, but the contrast in price with the non-liquid side of the menu here makes it more painful. Sarafin has been the prime mover in this affair, and their Chardonnay certainly pushes all the right buttons for those who enjoy having their buttons pushed by a Chardonnay. While their Merlot’s flavour is good,it does dye the drinker’s teeth and tongue a poetic shade of indigo. The Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc, likewise, are formal classics of the New World school. If you can find it a rare if a better bet for red is Sevilen’s Cabernet Merlot blend. You do also find such offerings from Gülor, but for the time being their prices are higher and quality a little lower. As of last year, there is a little treat at the end of the menu: Turkey’s first dessert wine, Safir, which while lacking the mellow, golden perfume of anything you might want to lay down by the case for your god-daughter has a lovely stony flavour underlying its sweetness and is a surprisingly sophisticated companion for your vanilla ice-cream. |
