Earlier this week, we went walking through London with my brother and sister-in-law, ending up at the Tad Ocakbasi Meze Bar in Hackney Central, meeting up with my brother’s brother-in-law and family for Turkish food.
Tad is a modestly classy Turkish place in Hackney Central sporting both eat-in and take-away service, based around classic Turkish grilled kebabs and meze dishes.
What really shined here was the meze. Meze is the cornerstone of Turkish cuisine, an assortment of appetizers or small dishes served before a main meal.
Tad serves a mixed meze which results in quite an impressive spread of food (I’m only showing about 1/3 of it here), with hummus, tabbouleh, muhammara, fattoush, and wider variety of salads than I chould hope to recall. Particularly good were the grilled onions. These were shockingly good, with a nice tangy pomegranate sauce.
My main course was Yogurtlu Basti, which was basically chicken kebab over Turkish bread, with both a garlicky tomato sauce and yogurti sauce liberally applied. The result was the sauce soaking into the strips of bread, resulting in little morsels of garlicky yumminess.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, although I think I would’ve enjoyed the straight up kebab almost as well.
We were very pleased with the food quality, and, while slightly pricey by my own only-partially-London-calibrated expectations, the quantity was almost excessive. If going here, expect to recieve shockingly bountiful quanties of food. The service was also friendly, pleasant, and efficient, making this a pleasant experience overall.
