

Even a raft of broad beans and chopped broccoli with a dollop of yogurt cheese and a lemony sauce was delicious.
#Chicken thoughts comics cracker
On the flip side to that $108 Cdn evening, Mikla restaurant, voted one of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, delivered another kind of experience for $457 Cdn - modern, formal, even stuffy, but the food was exquisite with four delightful amuse bouche, including a paper-thin cracker sculpture with an anchovy brooch and satiny dip. The 35 choices of raki certainly boosted the buzz, as did the affordable all-Turkish wine list with some grape varietals unique to the country, like okuzgozu and narince.Ī display near the entrance showcased some of the 80 or so mezes on offer, including Aegean greens, stuffed mussels, filo with cheese and pastrami, grilled octopus, crispy manti, marinated spinach root, muhammara, and mashed cheese with pistachio. Every table ordered it and we found the drink worked well with all our many meze dishes. On our own, my husband and I visited Karakoy Lokantasi restaurant, specializing in mezes or tapas-style dishes where we loved the fantastic value, chic interior, and buzz of locals socializing over mezes and raki, the twice-distilled grape spirit similar to sambuca or ouzo. I stifled a squeal of delight over dessert - whole baby eggplant, stewed in sugar, cloves, vanilla, lemon syrup, transformed into something like a gelée and served with a thick dollop of yogurt and sprinkles of pistachio. One of the daily specials was cig kofte, a spicy lamb tartare with bulgur, chopped veg and spices, which I’ve had at Parsley Berlin Style Doner-Kebab at the Amazing Brentwood Mall, but a spicy vegetarian version. The pilaf took its esteemed place in the cuisine - tall, proud, and encased in pastry.Īnchovy cracker amuse bouche at Mikla. Our lunch, from the “gunun menusu”, or menu of the day, included a lamb dish with green plums, a “sour kebab” stew with a tomato and pepper base, and a pilaf with raisins, pine nuts, almonds, chicken, onions and butter. Guests have shed tears, in Proustian madeleine moments, upon tasting a dish from their childhood or from their home region. Chef and owner Musa Dagdeviren is on a quest for the soul of Turkish cuisine, visiting remote villages, markets, food producers, farms, and the women who cook in homes (as opposed to male restaurant chefs). Restaurant food is not home cooking, and nothing showed that more than Ciya Sofrasi restaurant in Istanbul. I also loved a quince dessert, roasted for two hours and transformed into another kind of Turkish delight. Other dishes included rice pilaf, fluffed, moist and close to Turkish hearts. “You also see small dolmades for the same reason.” “Small is considered to be more beautiful and valuable,” Benoit said. The Turks also moved around - to China for example, where, inspired by wonton, they begat the manti dumpling, which we tried with a garlic yogurt sauce at a manti restaurant, along with ayran, a salted yogurt drink, which, in their hot summers, replaces the body’s salt loss. Turkish cuisine is a mash-up of geography and layers of historic influences from the Greeks, Romans and Persians. Otherwise, it’s like loving a woman with gloves.” We ate breaded grilled scorpion, sardine, and horse mackerel by hand, and were not poisoned. “Sardines, you eat by hand, not with cutlery.

There’s poison in a certain spot,” he said. “Red scorpions require skill to remove the toxins they contain. Benoit rhymed off the months in which bonito, blue fish, anchovies, turbot, sardines, horse mackerel, red cullet and scorpion fish are in season. Surrounded by four seas, seafood is central to coastal Turkish diets, although fish stocks are in decline. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

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