This was supposed to be a quick run down to the Karakoy hardware market for a faucet and some sandpaper, but our culinary backstreets antenna, always up, automatically changed the the afternoon’s priorities. So we followed the commotion to a tiny restaurant called Urfa Şark Sofrasi and pulled up a stool outside of this humble kebab shop.

The owner, Saim bey, convinced us to start with kurufasuliye, which was kept warm in a charred clay pot at the front. More famous in the Turkish Northeast and Central Anatolian regions, these beans were done in the Black Sea style with meat and plenty of butter, but also delivering a little extra kick of heat, that we attributed to the place’s link to Urfa, home of the diabolical isot, an oily, almost black dried and crushed red pepper.

Faced with the difficult task of choosing between a list of kebab, we ordered a mixed grill platter that included kanat (chicken wings), patlicanli kebab (minced lamb sheesh interrupted by thick slices of eggplant), and a kebab called haşhaş (pronounced, “hash hash”), which was as intoxicating as the name indicates. The meat was buried under mounds of fresh bread slathered with a spicy rub, rolls of soft lavash and spicy green peppers and tomatoes hot off of the grill. Working our way through the platter we kept seeking out chunks of the particularly crumbly, crispy yet soft sheesh. Finding the last piece hiding under a triangle of lavash, we asked Saim bey what we were eating.

“That’s hashas kebabi, knife-cut beef with lamb fat, super!” he said.

Super indeed, we agreed – even bleat-worthy.

Address: Persembe Pazari Caddesi, Keresteci fazil sokak 4, Karakoy
Telephone: +902122496963

(photo by Ansel Mullins)

Although this soup is probably best drunk at its source, we’ve recently come across a spot in Istanbul that serves up a very fine bowl of beyran – and not just for breakfast. Located in the bustling Aksaray neighborhood, Ehli Kebap is a grill house who’s advertised specialty is skewered liver in the style of Diyarbakir, a city a few hours to the east of Gaziantep. But tucked into the restaurant’s corner is a soup master with some serious Gaziantep chops who has his own cooking station – gaily festooned with strings of dried red peppers – devoted to beyran making.

Each serving of soup is made to order, cooked up inside its own metal bowl, the usta creating it like a kind of hot and soupy ice cream sundae. First up is a schmear of suet, the shortening-like fat found around the kidney of a sheep, to give the soup some silkiness. Piled on top of that is a mound of white rice and strands of lamb meat that has been slow-cooked for hours, until it is utterly tender, which give the soup its heft. To ratchet up the taste, the usta then adds a dollop of minced garlic to the bowl, and tops the whole thing with liberal sprinkles of light and dark red-pepper flakes. The bowl is then put on a blazing gas burner and a ladleful of broth of an unfathomable depth of flavor is added to it, the whole thing coming to a quick boil. By the time the beyran soup arrives at the table, it has achieved a lovely rusty red color, looking – and even tasting – something like a Turkish version of a Louisiana gumbo.

We generally don’t get too excited about soup, but recent visits to Ehli Kebap to sample their beyran have left us thinking that this may be among the finest soups we’ve had in town, something we would be more than happy to slurp down on a daily basis – breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Address: Simitçi Şakir Sokak 32, Aksaray
Telephone: (212) 631-3700

(photo by Yigal Schleifer)

Click here for a list of some of our favorites.

Entering through the hall lined with photos of esteemed guests our attention hung on the huge wall-covered grotto, the likes of which we haven’t seen outside of natural history museums. We won’t get into the ceramic bas-reliefs of Anatolian construction through the ages featuring Greek temples, Ottoman mosques and soaring office towers that adorn the other walls, or other such subtle details. Let the over-the-topness of the grotto – with its stuffed doe and gurgling brook – stand as a symbol for the glory of all things at Has Kral, including the food.

Looking at the menu, we spotted many similarities to one of our favorite restaurants, Akdeniz Hatay Sofrasi, which also serves the cuisine of Turkey’s Hatay area, near the southern border with Syria. Has Kral has the metrelik kebab, sheesh served by the meter, a sporting man’s choice. We also noticed the hallmark of Hatay whimsy, chicken or lamb baked in a salt dome and set ablaze at the table. Both are excellent at Akdeniz, but require advance order so we couldn’t sample Has Kral’s version.

We started our meal with a number of meze that we know and love from the Hatay kitchen – a zingy zahtar (fresh thyme) salad, fattush, or green salad riddled with crunchy fried pide chips, and lubnan ezmesi, which combined a salty soft cheese with roasted eggplant yogurt and dried red peppers. The starters, along with one of our favorite guilty pleasures between courses, icli kofte, were delicious.

Selecting from the list of kebabs is an overwhelming part of a meal at Has Kral. However poetic, items with names like “the dance of kebab” didn’t help us make a decision. We asked the waiter to translate the list into plain kebab language and settled on one of the specials, featuring an assortment of three kebabs. Here’s where Has Kral earned its crown.

Two of the three kebabs were shockingly good. The third, a çöp şiş, was very good by any normal measure but paled in comparison to its compatriots on the plate. One of those, made of fatty ground lamb shot through with bright green pistachios and shreds of red pepper, was crumbly and almost sweet. We found its partner, bursting with pine nuts, so moist and delicious that we thought we might be hallucinating. But that’s the Has Kral experience – trippy, down to the last detail.

There is a tempting desert menu, including candied unripe eggplants and walnuts, but by the end of the kebab course the atmosphere of Has Kral can get a little heavy. We suggest wandering the little streets around Has Kral, , in search of that perfectly plain kunefe shack. They are out there and we find kunefe, a traditional kebab house desert of shredded pastry and cheese soaked in syrup, is somehow sweeter when sitting on a rickety stool on the sidewalk, rather than when being stared down by a stuffed doe perched on a concrete grotto.

Address: Ragib Bey sok. 25/A, Aksaray
Telephone: (212) 534-9707
Web: http://www.haskralsofrasi.com/

There was nothing simple about selecting the number one lahmacun maker in Istanbul. There are scores of freshly fired crispy/chewy, spicy/piquant versions of the dish all over town. But, perhaps by sheer coincidence, our top two lahmacun joints are located a stone’s throw from each other in the Asian side’s Kadikoy district, which at least gave us the chance to line them up for a side-by-side comparison of lahmacun-ness.

We started the sampling at Halil Lahmacun – an old favorite and a celebrated destination for Istanbul lahmacun lovers. In 1980, Urfa native Halil Dortok turned his back on a promising career as a tailor to open a small shop with an oven where he started making lahmacun. Perhaps it was a tailor’s attention to detail, but Halil’s oven-baked creations quickly won him fame in the lahmacun world.  Today Halil’s son Fuat is in charge of the oven and, judging by the traffic in the shop on a Wednesday well before lunchtime, nobody is complaining.

Lahmacun, like pizza, is one of those mysterious foods where a lot is created with so little. But in the hands of a real master, or usta, a paper-thin round of dough topped with a simple mix of ground peppers, meat and spices, becomes something magical – almost a living thing.

Fuat pulled two lahmacun from the oven for us – the perfectly round edges just slightly charred from sitting on the floor of the brick oven – and garnished them with a bit of parsley and a lemon wedge on the side. Mama Mia! This looked like a perfect lahmacun.

This was a fine specimen. The topping was light and had a clean taste of fresh vegetables, even without the parsley and a spritz of lemon juice. “Crispy” was the word double-underlined in our field notes, followed by “awesome.”

From there it was on to our next taste-ination. We are usually suspicious of chains, particularly when it comes to something as hand-crafted as lahmacun. But in the past, we’ve enjoyed many a lahmacun at the Kadikoy fish market location of Borsam Taş Firin, an Istanbul mini-chain of lahmacun ovens. When we set out to find the number one lahmacun in Istanbul, we were intrigued by a few tips that urged us to head toward another branch of Borsam, just a few streets north of the market. Preference of one branch over another of the same chain must indicate the presence of an outstanding usta, we thought to ourselves.

Still quite impressed by Halil and ready to walk off a full lunch at Ciya, we headed uphill to find Borsam Taş Firin in full swing. This is not a place that skimps on production. Along with an oven-tending usta and his two assistants, there was a young man whose sole occupation was to brush off excess flour from the back of the freshly baked lahmacun with a tiny broom, before passing it on to be served. The team worked in a quick rhythm and we had our lahmacun in hand within a minute or two of ordering.

Discerning between these two top-notch lahmacun makers – Halil and Borsam – seemed impossible. Like Halil’s, Borsam’s lahmacun, with its lovely contrasts of oven-darkened crust and deep red flecked topping, looked ready for the cover shoot of Bon Appétit Magazine. But we recognized the difference before even tasting this one, thanks to Borsam’s brush boy, who rolled up our lahmacun into a baton with some parsley inside, forcing us to tear it apart to share. Thinking back to the first lahmacun of the day, Halil’s was not the tearing sort, its crust so crisp it nearly shattered in our hands. Borsam’s lahmacun, on the other hand, first snapped a bit and then gave way to a soft stretchy second layer of the crust hidden between the bubbly topping and the matzo-like crispy bottom crust. Imagine a crust just a couple of millimeters thick with three completely different personalities all formed in just a few minutes in a raging oven. This is the lahmacun usta’s magic touch. With a crust this complex, the topping, a peppery, musty spread that reminded us that this is not a vegetarian treat, was almost beside the point.

Due to the work of the nameless doughboy who, by luck or instinct, created a lasting memory, Borsam won our vote for the best lahmacun maker in Istanbul. Our search for lahmacun perfection is over (for now).

Halil Lahmacun
Address: Guneslibahce Sokak 26, Kadikoy
Telephone: 0216-337-0123

Borsam Taş Firin Lahmacun
Address: Serasker Sokak 78, Kadikoy
Telephone: 0216-349-4323

(photos by Robert H.Gertner)

Let’s face it: lahmacun is easy to get excited about. It checks all of the boxes of a perfect savory snack – crispy-oven fired crust, light and spicy meat spread, with a fresh green topping and a tangy spray from a lemon. It’s like an artisanal pizza with a Middle Eastern topping wrapped around a side salad – for the cost of a shoeshine.

How anyone could not love lahmacun is beyond us. Still, we hear they are out there. The only explanation is that they never had a really good one. Meaning they never set foot in Fistik Kebap, the be-all and end-all lahmacun of Istanbul. (Click here for the full review)

(Editor’s Note: A recent article about a spat between Turkey and Greek Cyprus over who owns the rights to claim lahmacun as their own got us thinking about those minced-meat covered discs of dough and how, when done right, they really are something worth fighting over. So, prompted by the Turkish-Cypriot food fight, we’ve decided to officially declare this week “Lahmacun Week in Istanbul,” where we’ll be looking at five of our undisputed favorite spots in town to get a taste of how the contested savory delight should be made. Today’s post takes a look at Öz Kilis, a spot on a Fatih backstreet serving lahmacun (and kebab) as its made in southeastern Turkish city of Kilis.)

In Turkish popular lore, the denizens of Kilis, a town in southeastern Turkey right near the Syrian border, are known for several things: kebab and lahmacun making and smuggling. We haven’t been to Kilis, so we can’t vouch for the smuggling bit. But we did recently have lunch at Öz Kilis, a wonderful little spot on a quiet back street in the Fatih neighborhood run by two Kilis natives, and can report that the kebab and lahmacun making reputation is well deserved. (Click here for the rest of the review)

(Editor’s Note: A recent article about a spat between Turkey and Greek Cyprus over who owns the rights to claim lahmacun as their own got us thinking about those minced-meat covered discs of dough and how, when done right, they really are something worth fighting over. So, prompted by the Turkish-Cypriot food fight, we’ve decided to officially declare this week “Lahmacun Week in Istanbul,” where we’ll be looking at five of our undisputed favorite spots in town to get a taste of how the contested savory delight should be made. We start today with Tophane’s Ismael Kebapcısı, an Istanbul Eats standby.)

Where Beyoglu slopes down towards the Bosphorus in Tophane, a rough-around-the-edges district named after a nearby Ottoman-era cannon factory, there’s not much in the way of swanky eating. Judging by the great piles of husks on the sidewalk, sunflower seeds are the dietary staple of the neighborhood. Well, that and a spicy flatbread called lahmacun (pronounced lah-ma-joon).

Over at Ismael Kebapcısı, owner Ismael smiles broadly from his post by a blackened stone oven. He’s always got a little dough on him, and at lunchtime he’s making it hand over fist. Ismael grills up mincemeat kebabs and chicken sheesh, but he clearly takes most pleasure in plucking a small handful of dough, dusting it with flour and rolling it out matzo-thin on the marble slab before him. He pats on top of it a fine spread of ground meat, tomato, onion, red pepper paste and spices and then shoves it deep into the hearth with a long paddle. That’s about all there is to a preparing a lahmacun.

There have got to be a dozen other lahmacun makers within a four-block radius of Ismael. You may ask, “Why is thislahmacun different from all other lahmacun?”

“Because I think positively!” Ismael explained one day, twinkling eyes lit by a clear sense of duty.

We’re not inclined to doubt Ismael on that point. Positive thinking goes a long way in the kitchen and the proof is sitting right there on the end of his paddle. (Click here to read the rest of the review)

We were recently lucky enough to be allowed into what felt like one of Istanbul’s most inner sanctums – Mrs. Sabirtasi’s kitchen – and observe her work her culinary magic firsthand. Below is the recipe for the family’s award-winning icli kofte, truly one of Istanbul’s top culinary delights.

Ingredients:
½ kilo lean ground beef
¾ kilo white onion
½ kilo fine, or “koftelik,” bulgur
100 grams walnuts
½ bunch parsley
1 teaspoon black pepper
½ tablespoon salt
½ tablespoon red pepper flakes (preferably from the city of Maras)
½ tablespoon tomato paste (“salca”)

Preparation:

1. Filling: Finely chop onions and parsley. Crush the walnuts.
In a large pan or skillet, brown the onions with the beef continuously mixing over medium-high heat for about 15-20 minutes.
When browned and crumbly, remove from heat and add parsley, walnuts, and spices. Mix well, cover and refrigerate overnight.

2. Shell: Put the bulgur in a large mixing bowl and pour very hot water over it – enough to cover the bulgur. Mix in 1 tablespoon of tomato paste and a bit of salt. Allow the bulgur to sit in the water until it cools and the bulgur expands fully. When cool, knead the bulgur by hand thoroughly for 20 minutes. This is hard work but essential for the consistency of the shell. When it reaches a slightly elastic pasty consistency it is sufficiently kneaded.

3. Assembly: Here’s where the technique comes in. Take a small handful (about 100 g) of bulgur and make a ball. Make a hole in the ball with your index finger while rotating the ball with your opposite hand. As you hollow out the ball it should lengthen in your hand and start to take the shape of a small cup. The walls of the shell should be firm and consistently around 2mm thick. Once the shell is evenly hollowed and about 8cm in length, gently fill it with the filling (about 1.5 tablespoons) but leave a little room at the top so you won’t have trouble closing it.

Now comes the second trick – closing the kofte. Moisten your hands with water and slowly spin the open kofte with one hand while gently tapering closed the open top on top. As you continuously spin it you can remove any excess shell that may appear. This process somehow reminded us of watching cigars being rolled. What results should be a firm little football shape about 8cm long and 4 wide.

4. Frying: At Sabirtasi they use a deep fryer, but any deep pot will do for frying. Heat enough vegetable oil to 350F so that once you put the icli kofte in to fry they will be completely submerged. Fry until golden brown.

Recipe makes 20-25 icli kofte, 130-150 G apiece.

(Editor’s Note: We’ve recently been given access into one of Istanbul’s most inner of sanctums: the kitchen of Beyoglu’s Sabirtasi, where we were shown how to make the restaurant’s superlative icli kofte, winner of our “Top 5 Street Foods” contest from a while back. We will be sharing the recipe on Friday, but as a warmup, we’re rerunning our original post about Sabirtasi’s icli kofte.)

For years on Istiklal Caddesi, just beyond Galatasaray High School, in one calm spot stood the beatific Ali Bey, an angel in a white doctor’s coat offering salvation in the form of golden fried icli kofte.  Though he passed away recently, Ali Bey left his post and his streetside stand — as much a part of the Istiklal streetscape as the red trolley cars that run up and down the boulevard and the belle époque apartment buildings that line it — to his son, who fills it with the same panache, white jacket and all. And thanks to Ali bey’s wife, Fatma hanim, the icli kofte lives on.

Known as kibbeh in the Arab world, icli kofte is a savory snack consisting of a bulgur wheat shell that holds a filling of ground meat, onions, parsley and spices. These little torpedoes are handmade upstairs by Fatma hanim, who spends most of the day at a large table with her daughter-in-law working the stuffing into the casing before passing them on for final preparation. They chat and laugh as they work, their hands working by what appears to be instinct alone — a scene more reminiscent of a rural family kitchen than a dining room with a view of one of Istanbul’s best-known streets.

(Click here to go to the full review)