Eating Turkish at Alaturkish

 13 August 2021

 

ALATURKISH

Napier Street / Rockwell Building, Cape Town

 

I was (in a phrase I leant from Twitter) today years old when I heard of the expression “tourist tea” or even “carpet seller’s tea,” a somewhat cynically pejorative reference to Turkish apple tea, a cloyingly sweet, cold beverage universally offered to tourists in Turkey who are being suckered into, uh, I mean bargaining for, buying a carpet or perhaps a handbag. Turks, as a rule, don’t touch the stuff.

 

This, and other interesting snippets about Turkey, its history and its cuisine, is what Tayfun Aras, the famed ex-proprietor of Anatoli Turkish Restaurant, shared with me at lunch today at Alaturkish (ironically across Napier Street from Anatoli).

 

The wife and I ate at the restaurant, then called Alaturca, in March 2020, just before the hard lockdown was implemented and, as a last hurrah before being confined and restricted to home cooking, it was a dismal affair. The food wasn’t good, and the service was mediocre. The wife swore never to return.

 

The restaurant has been rebranded and relaunched and Tayfun suggested I come to lunch with him to see how things are now.

 

The interior of the restaurant is your basic sleek, elegant, modern bistro but there is a substantial seating area outside, under trees, with more of the same elegant tables, but also an area against the rear wall with upholstered benches and rustic tables that are closer to a typical outdoor Turkish setting, and on a warm, wind free day or evening, this is where one would want to sit. There are electric and gas heaters though, for the cool nights. 

 

The menu is expansive and colourful, with lots of enticing photographs of the dishes on offer, though I’m always slightly suspicious that the food on the plate in front of you will not necessarily match the image from which you ordered. The mezzes fit on one page and there are two pages of dishes from the grill, featuring lamb, beef or chicken. I scanned the offerings very quickly, full of excitement for the occasion (I don’t get out as much as I used to) and can’t give a detailed description but everything looks as if it would be worth investigating. The food is not exactly the same style as Tayfun used to offer at Anatoli and, if I understood correctly, is more typical of the eastern regions of Turkey.

 

Tayfun guided me through a Turkish way of eating lunch. We started with chai, which he drinks a lot of, that I had with some sweetener and quite enjoyed as an aperitif. We drank ayran with our food. It’s a cool, yoghurt drink diluted a bit with water and with salt, not quite the beer I would usually have but it does cool the palate. Alaturkish does not sell liquor.

 

We started with a lovely lentil soup and pide accompaniment. I’m used to a thick, spicy Turkish lentil soup and this version was much thinner, lighter and not terribly spicy, but deeply flavourful and exuberant, especially so with a few squeezes of fresh lemon juice. and the pide with its crisp, crunchy crust and fluffy crumb was the best bread I’ve had in a while.  From past experience, I know that Turkish bread is almost addictive and this pide could seduce me into a life of gluten enriched bread gluttony. 

 

Tayfun’s main was a large lahmacum with piquantly spiced lamb mince on pliable flat bread that one can fold into a tube to eat. It also comes with a segment of lemon and  fresh salad elements. He shared some with me. I should’ve insisted he surrender the whole thing, but I’m not demanding like that. It was glorious.

 

I chose the Adana kebap, a dish from south-eastern Turkey, and received a plate with the tubular kebap served on two leaves of soft flat bread (lavash, or that style), a heap of small, ribbed fries, rice and three coils of raw vegetables: carrot, red cabbage and green cabbage. 

 

I’ve seen this overload of carbs before in Turkey, at restaurants aimed at the unwary, uncritical foreign tourist whose best meal is steak, egg and chips.  A bountiful platter of food is a thing of beauty but this ménage á trois of carbs is just too much. I ate everything on my plate except for the rice.

 

The presentation of the dish doesn’t appear to be very traditional; the Turkish version seems to be much simpler. When I eat at a Turkish restaurant, wherever it might be, I want to eat Turkish food cooked and presented as close as possible to way it would be done in Turkey and not some, for example, bowdlerised South African version. If the dish isn’t served with fries in Turkey, don’t serve it with fries here.

 

The lamb kebap is not spicy at all (apparently, also toned down for the non-Turkish diner) but perfectly grilled, succulent and subtly flavourful, the fries were delectable, and the salad was fresh and good though a tad odd in presentation.

 

I had no space for dessert, and anyway the only Turkish dessert I truly dote on, is sutlac, though that thing they make with chicken is also quite lovely.  Most other Turkish desserts are far too sweet for me.

 

I did finish with some life enhancing, medium sweet Turkish coffee. The way the coffee is served is redolent of Oriental luxurious exoticism and deeply satisfying I’d had an elegant sufficiency of quite excellent food and the coffee was a seemly full stop to the meal. 

 

It’s trite that any national cuisine cooked in another country may not be as authentic, for various reasons, as the restaurant might claim and I don’t truly mind that Alaturkish’s food might not be cooked or presented exactly the way it would  be in the homeland (except for the superfluous, unwarranted fries), as long as what I get is tasty.  This is what I got.  I suppose the wife, whose soul was crushed by the sub-standard lamb shank dish she was offered in 2020, might still not be ready to return but for me, it’s worth giving the place a second chance. 

 

It was a good lunch and an educational experience; is that such a bad thing?