Offbeat Eats

One of the enjoyable aspects of my London trips is that, in addition to all the great British and Commonwealth cuisines that get good representation, the London metro area has quite a good collection of Turkish restaurants. Previously, I’ve gotten to enjoy Tad in Hackney, and Likya in Golders Green, and particularly Kazan right down the street from my brother’s flat. Kazan isn’t the only Turkish option in Pimlico, either, just around the corner lies Cyprus Mangal. We’ve been there a few times before, when the food was excellent but I would have called the dining room ambiance “cozy”. But sometime in the last few years Cyprus Mangal had a rather major renovation and we decided it was a good opportunity to drop in and give them another try.

One of the cuisines I rather enjoy when I’m in London is Turkish food, since the London area has more than a few really delicious Turkish places. Previously, I’ve rather enjoyed outing to Tad in Hackney, and Likya in Golders Green, and there are literally dozens of other good Turkish restaurants around London. One of these, Kazan, is literally just down the road from my brother’s flat, and it’s been on our to-do list for a while (at least 2009, when we actually had breakfast at their sister restaurant Kazan Kitchen across the street). But various complications seem to always happen when we attempt to go there; three times our visit fell during a period when Kazan was closed for the holidays. Another time, we were unable to secure reservations. Yet another time, a power outage caused us to have to re-plan. But this visit, we made finally visiting Kazan a priority, and were finally able to visit.

Heading back towards the Golders Green tube station, we passed Likya, a pleasant Turkish ocakbasi restaurant just a few doors down the way. Like a lot of ocakbasi (“Grill”) restaurants, especially in London, Likya puts their large grill right up front, so as you walk by you are tempted by all the delicious meats and vegetables getting grilled up right in front of you. In this case, it was enough to get us to head right in.

One of the things I enjoy about going to large international cities is that they tend to have immigrant communities, which gives them plenty of good ethnic restaurants in addition to the native foods. For Frankfurt, one of the larger immigrant communities is Turkish, with several parts of town having notable concentrations of Turkish businesses. In particular, the directly east of the Hauptbahnhof has several large and well-regarded Turkish halal restaurants places. One of these, Central Grill, was my choice for lunch on my last day in Frankfurt.

Last month, my brother came to visit from England, so on the morning of St Patrick’s Day we had to pick up my brother at Logan, which meant this was a good opportunity to try out a new place for breakfast someplace down in the Boston area. I know a rather good selection of places to eat in the Boston area, but not a lot of breakfast places (a byproduct of the fact that Boston is around 2.5-3 hours from here, depending on traffic, is that we usually get there well after breakfast hours). But several of my friends up here in NH have lived down there, so I asked coworker A for a good Saturday brunch suggestion. She was already going to be in Boston that weekend, so she simply recommended that we just join her and some friends at Sofra in Cambridge for some of their “Turkish Inspired Cuisine.”

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.