19 Numara Bos Cirrik I, Dalston

On the one hand, this is going to be yet another blog post about a fantastic, ludicrously cheap Ocakbasi grill, and to that end, I apologise if it feels like you've heard it all before. Londoners are spoiled for decent Turkish restaurants in a way that almost no other cuisine can manage - some are better than others, of course, and I imagine it is at least theoretically possible to have a bad Turkish if you try hard enough, but there are just so many good ones scattered around certain areas of Dalston and Shoreditch that you'd have to be very unlucky to come away disappointed. In one tiny stretch of the Stoke Newington Road there is the brilliant and ever popular Mangal 2, the unpronounceable but apparently very highly regarded Istanbul Iskembecisi, and the cryptically titled 19 Numara Bos Cirrik I, where I spent a thoroughly enjoyable Monday evening.


You know there is some real talent in a kitchen when even something as straightforward as house hummus draws gasps of approval. It was, in fact, the finest example of this humble dish I've had in a very long time - light and smooth, seasoned perfectly and astonishingly fresh. A generous round of lahmacun (sort of a Turkish pizza for want of a better description) was straight out of the oven and lovely and crisp, and cost a pathetic £2; amazing value. And even a plate of yoghurt and cucumber did its job commendably well, cooling the soft house bread and tasting bright and summery.


The only problem I had with the house salad "Esme" was that I wasn't sure how to eat it. Chopped and crushed and ground down so much (I watched them do it) it had turned into a kind of Turkish gazpacho, and the flat plate it came on was hugely impractical. But, needless to say, it was seasoned well, tasted great, and was a lovely colour from the tomatoes and fresh parsley. And while perhaps not quite up there with the version at FM Mangal in Camberwell (and I doubt anything ever could be), the pomegranate and onion pickle was still hugely addictive. The Esme was £4 and the onion pickle was free. Crazy.



Deep fried I think rather than grilled, the halloumi wasn't 19NBC's greatest creation, but tempered with the onion pickle it had crunch and enough salty cheesy goodness to make it worth the effort. And around this time yet another free salad arrived, just a straightforward mix of tomatoes, lettuce, onion and cabbage dressed in olive oil and parsley but still, they went to the effort of making it for us and didn't even charge. The generosity of spirit is heartwarming.



Lamb behti kebabs came served on house bread soaked up the meat juices and soft brown rice. The kebabs themselves were top-drawer, moist and rich and seasoned perfectly, and there was a huge amount of meat here for £9.50. Part of the reason our bill was so low could have been that this was the only significant meat dish we ordered, but as it was midsummer (and 19NBC has no air conditioning, so be warned) we didn't really feel like anything too heavy.


With two beers, a Ribena (don't ask) and as much iced tap water as you could want, the bill came to just £40 for 4 people. All four of us left stuffed, happy and with kebab juice staining our clothing (well OK that might have just been me) and with nothing, other than perhaps the raging heat, to complain about. It is hard not to get complacent when you're tucking into another great Turkish grill and paying a pittance for it, but the astonishing quality and value of so many of these places should not distract for a second from the effort and skill that must go into running them. 19 Numara Bos Cirrik I is Yet Another Great Ocakbasi, and I will never get bored of eating there.

8/10

FM Mangal, Camberwell

There's something special about the FM Mangal pickle sauce. It's brought out with the house bread whether you're sitting down to a £6 lunch special (huge and surely one of the great lunch bargains of London) or, as we were last night, ordering way too much from the dinner menu, and it tastes bloody amazing - attractively purpley-red, just the right balance of sweet and sharp and containing huge chunks of crispy charcoal-blackened onion. But that's not why it's special. At least, it's not the only reason. It's special because despite persistent (polite) questioning, none of the staff at FM Mangal will reveal what goes into it.


"It's a chef's secret," they say.
"But is it pomegranate? Beetroot? Is there garlic?"
"It's a chef's secret, sorry."

And there's nothing more likely to pique the interest of a curious food blogger than a hint of mystery surrounding a dish or a restaurant. It's what made the Meatwagon story so appealing - you could guess at the recipe for the bun, you could watch the guys making the things like a hawk, you could try and ask the owner Yianni where he got his cheese from, but somehow you just wouldn't get anywhere. The bun would remain glossy and tasty and just firm enough whilst being stubbornly unavailable to anyone else, the method seemed simple from what you could gather from watching and yet any attempts to recreate the things in your own kitchen were doomed to failure, and good luck getting anything but obfuscation and enigmatic evasion from Yianni. All you can do is eat those burgers and wonder how on earth they do it. It's infuriating - utterly, deliberately, deliciously infuriating.



As well as the mysterious house pickle sauce, though, there are still plenty of things to enjoy about FM Mangal. We started with a tray of cold mezze, which although fairly unadventurous (shop-bought tarama, for example, and a rather soggy tabbouleh) was still a huge amount of food for £6 and the lovely staff kept bringing out replacement bread as we ploughed our happy way through it. The bread deserves a special mention in fact - as well as being fresh and fluffy and plentiful, it appears to have been brushed with some kind of spice paste, giving it an interesting extra kick. We also enjoyed a little plate of sliced sucuk, hot Turkish sausage, dense and spicy.



Best of the mains was something called the FM Mangal Special, in which tender and tasty chunks of lamb kofte sat on top of a puréed aubergine and yoghurt sauce. A cut above your average ocakbasi dish, this contained a really interesting mix of textures and rich flavours, particularly the smoky, soft aubergine. Less impressive sadly were some lamb chops - I didn't mind so much they'd cooked them through to chewy grey but they didn't taste of anything other than plain grilled lamb. They definitely could have done with some more interesting marinade (or even any marinade at all).


Kenat were notable not just because they were beautifully cooked, crunchy outside and moist within, but because they were possibly the most enormous chicken wings I've ever seen. Each half-wing was the size and shape of a drumstick, and just four of them produced the amount of meat you'd normally expect to find on a whole bird. I don't know what freakish breed of chicken FM Mangal's butcher uses, but if they're conducting some kind of secret genetic experiment to compliment their secret dipping sauce, I think someone needs to tell Environmental Health. Scary.


In the same spirit of generosity and hospitality that had made our evening up to this point so enjoyable, with the bill (a pittance at just over £20 a head with two bottles of wine, and we had ordered far too much food) we were brought slices of watermelon, cubes of Turkish Delight and a three shots of hilarious multicoloured spirits - creme de banane, creme de menthe and triple sec. Perhaps some obscure Turkish liqueur would have been more authentic, but you have to love the idea of ending a meal on a random raid on the back of the drinks cabinet. Naff perhaps, but still rather charming.


A great little restaurant, then, and one that is evidently and deservedly popular. Through the smoke billowing up from the grill I could make out not only every table taken with a mix of large families, friends and couples but also a healthy queue of people milling about waiting for takeaway; the atmosphere was homely and happy, and it gladdened the heart. Or maybe that was just the Turkish house wine (surprisingly decent, £14 a bottle). But I will be back, I'm sure, and often - food like this, and so much of it, and at these prices, is easily enjoyed. And maybe one day I may even work out what goes into their secret pickle sauce.

8/10

Mangal 2, Dalston

One of the great ethnic food styles of London, I've never had an ocakbasi (translating as far as I can tell as simply 'charcoal grill') that's been anything less than decent, and they have the potential to be very good indeed. Yet bizarrely, they also seem to be one of the most overlooked cuisines in the capital, certainly next to Chinese or Vietnamese or Indian/Pakistani. At the risk of sounding patronising, I can't help feeling they often only have themselves to blame - I've known many a very impressive ocakbasi grill (characterised by their huge extractor hoods) hiding towards the back of the restaurant, while pride of place in the shop window goes to two columns of sweaty doner meat and a tray of deep-fried chicken. It's hardly the best way to attract passing trade, but then again, perhaps it's all deliberate, meaning only those with an insatiable desire for food adventure, or sufficiently clued-up locals, are deemed suitable to sample the proper food. And it was thanks partly to a very clued-up local and my own mindlessly optimistic attitude towards London restaurants that I found myself in Mangal 2 in Dalston last night, sampling some very proper food indeed.


The first real test of any ocakbasi is the house bread. I've mentioned before I find it surprising that considering almost every single Turkish restaurant in London has a big wood fired oven and makes its own bread, how little of it is any good. Before Mangal 2, my favourite Turkish bread came out of the ovens at Meze Mangal in New Cross; now, Mangal 2 has taken that crown. This stuff was marvellous - piping hot, delicately crusted outside and gently billowy within, it was gently seasoned and had an addictive butteryness that's so often missing from Turkish bread in London. Mangal 2 give you a huge basket of the stuff without even charging for it, which is straight out of the "how to win favour with Cheese and Biscuits" instruction manual and should be applauded.



I'll continue with the menu items that didn't impress too much. Most disappointingly of all, the house hummus was rather lumpy, which would have been forgivable in itself if it hadn't also tasted strangely old and mouldy - not very pleasant. Also the Lahmacun (a kind of Turkish pizza) needed something to lift it out of the ordinary - it was bland and slightly underseasoned and although perfectly edible wasn't anything I'd rush to order again.


But now the good news. Sucuk, Turkish beef sausages, looked like something out of a tin from the 1950s but tasted lovely - spicy and dense and with a good texture of real beef that belied their processed appearance; a plate of six chicken wings were crispy from the grill, moist inside and with a subtle piquant marinade; and a few slices of halloumi were nicely browned and served with a couple of good crispy pickles to cut through the grease. All the hot dishes were served, too, on a mixture of fresh leaves and grilled vegetables, which I thought was an excellent idea - lettuce is better fresh, onion is nice grilled, so why not serve them together?



All these dishes, you may have noticed, were starter portions. If there's only two of you, it's a great way to sample as much of the menu as possible without getting hugely stuffed, and is a technique I often employ to good effect in Vietnamese restaurants (where in fact I've found the starters are often more interesting the mains anyway). Somehow though, we still rolled out of Mangal 2 last night completely full, and having spent close to a pittance - about £12 each, even including service which, by the way, was smart and friendly. I'm not going to pretend that Mangal 2 is the greatest Turkish restaurant in London, or even that it's worth a special journey, but it is perhaps time that some of the many solid, dependable local ocakbasi places got the attention they deserve. So next time you're walking past your nearest kebab shop, try to look past the doner meat and the greasy chicken pieces and see if there's a huge, gleaming copper extractor hood lurking further inside. If there is, you may have just discovered your new favourite local restaurant. You're welcome.

7/10

Testi, Stoke Newington

There's something commendably unapologetic about the way Testi, an Ocakbasi grill in Stoke Newington, displays its most (in)famous ingredient in their front window. There, pride of place in one of those glass cabinets a high-street kebab shop may use to hold marinating chicken shish or lamb koftes, are a dozen alarmingly large raw lamb's testicles, looking like fleshy plums next to the more prosaic rib joints and kidneys. I had made a special journey to Testi to eat these things, and I wasn't about to change my mind, but I do have to admit to a certain amount of trepidation once I was staring at them in the flesh, so to speak. Not exactly the most appetising of items, are they? Pale and swollen, with strange dark slug-like tubes running down the side; it's largely a cultural thing I'm sure, but it's not hard to see why they are somewhat of a rarity at your local butchers or neighbourhood restaurant. It's also not too surprising you don't read much about them on food blogs or in the mainstream press, as attempting to write a review of a plate of testicles without slipping into Carry On territory is a bit of a minefield. Let's see how I do.


But before the main event, a couple of starters. The house hummus was a pretty standard affair - creamy and with good texture but missing anything to lift it out of the ordinary. And despite the house bread being fresh out of the oven it was strangely tasteless - this may be the style in these places, as all Turkish bread I've ever tried has been lacking in this department. However a plate of Albanian-style chopped liver was absolutely wonderful, the moist, char grilled meat balanced with the delicately pickled onions and the dish as a whole lifting these cheap ingredients into something really special. This plate was cleaned in record time.


So I imagine some of you are wondering what marinated, char grilled lamb's testicles taste like. The description 'offaly' is probably a little obvious, but it's true that the meat itself had that dense, smooth texture of, say, brain. Not unpleasant but rather unsatisfying, a little bit like Quorn. What made the dish was the spicy marinade, which created a lovely crust on the little nuggets of meat and added complexity to what I'm guessing raw is a rather uniform, uninteresting product. The main point is, I've tried it now, and didn't hate it, and so now I don't need to again. Job done.


Amongst the other mains brought to our table was a few grilled quail - perfectly seasoned, and benefitting very well from the char from the grill, and some genuinely superbly cooked lamb chops, again seasoned perfectly and boasting a generous blackened crust. Sides were also exceptional - roasted onions in a pomegranate pickle were a fresh and attractive balance of textures and flavours, and a salad was nicely dressed with fresh herbs and black olives.


Now, there were bits here and there that weren't perfect, obviously, but where it mattered Testi delivered in spades - fresh meat, fresh ingredients, well seasoned, well executed, cooked simply and presented honestly. It's everything you'd want in a local restaurant, and although it's not leagues ahead of others in the same style (Tas Firin, No19BC2, etc.) it just does everything across the board well enough to be that much ahead of the pack. I had a lovely evening, and I will certainly be back - only next time, perhaps I'll leave the testicles alone.... Damn, so close.

8/10

19 Numara Bos Cirrik 2, Stoke Newington

In the ten or so days since my last review, Iceland has declared itself bankrupt. I was understandably quite pleased when I heard this news - how nice to be spared those gratingly irritating Kerry Katona ads designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator lazy parents who couldn't be bothered doing anything more worthwhile for their offspring than heat up a batch of chicken nuggets and oven chips. Sadly, it wasn't to be - the Iceland going bankrupt was in fact the country, not exactly known for its culinary output and therefore of little interest to me, and the curse of what Andrew at Eyedropper calls "brown food" - sealed plastic packages of greasy processed food - is here to stay. In fact given recent global events the chances are we might be seeing a lot more of Miss Katona and her ilk. For as many Gordon Ramsays and Jamie Olivers there are telling us that it really is easy - and most importantly cheap - to cook fresh, tasty food in your own homes there are as many others who will try to make a living out of convincing the population that all you really need for a balanced diet is a packet of spiced potato wedges and a microwave. And when times are tough and money is tight, I have a feeling that it's easier to make a 99p pack of spring rolls look like the budget option next to the effort of chopping an onion and crushing a garlic. I hope I'm proved wrong, but Mssrs Oliver and Ramsay really do have their work cut out.

It is, I've mentioned before, the restaurants which make you feel like you're getting value for money that will thrive in the current climate, even if it is just a "feeling" rather than a genuine generosity of spirit. The Giaconda wasn't anything more than a competent gastropub serving food at standard prices, but little tricks with the bill and the table charge made you feel much better about parting with your cash. The "trick" employed by the oddly-named 19 Numara Bos Cirrik 2 is far more straightforward - gut-busting portions for not very much money. The menu was also of a generous size - about 8 pages - although closer inspection revealed quite a bit of duplication and nothing really that unique in terms of ingredients or dishes. But Ocakbasi is what it is - tasty, filling comfort food served without pretension, and to this end 19NBC2 fills its remit very well.

19 Numara Bos Cirrik 2 was filling up rapidly when we arrived at about 8:00pm on Saturday night. The crowd was I think a mixture of families, young couples and old Turkish men reading the paper, although it was a bit difficult to tell as the room seemed to be lit only by small tea lights on each table and the focal point of the room - a huge grill near the door - kept the air thick with charcoal smoke and steam.

We started with a huge selection of mixed mezze, most of which was slightly on the dull side but included a nice bean salad, homemade hummus and some cheesy samosa thingies. Hardly mind-blowing but at about £3.50 each we weren't complaining, and there was a lot of it.


My mixed grill was a decent enough example of its type - the highlight being small sections of lamb ribs, an unusual cut for a Western restaurant but juicy and attractively bite-sized. The best you could say about the other bits and pieces was that they were cooked properly and weren't too dry, although I think in most cases I could have done with extra seasoning and/or spicing. The problem with Turkish food, similar to Spanish food, is that it relies upon zingingly fresh ingredients cooked quickly and simply, and if your ingredients aren't quite up to the task, as so often happens in this country, the end product suffers. But it was just what the doctor ordered for a relaxing Saturday evening and I should also mention that the house bread was some of the best of its type I've had in this country, fluffy and rich and - of course - barely minutes out of the oven.


Another nod to authenticity (and our wallets) was the £12 bottle of Turkish wine we had with the meal. There were a few funny faces pulled around the table on first tasting, but I didn't think it was too bad. Given a choice between cutting back on the food or the wine, I would always choose the wine - most restaurants worth their salt wouldn't ever serve anything completely undrinkable, although having said that I know I'm just setting myself up to be proved wrong.

What my visit to 19 Numara Bos Cirrik 2 proved, again, is that the tiniest bit of research can prove the difference between throwing away your precious pennies on somewhere cheap and rubbish and getting real value from a small local restaurant. And what the food we were served that evening proved is that it is possible to create a substantial, tasty meal from budget ingredients in little to no time at all, and without a plastic packet of brown food in sight. Kerry Katona take note.

7/10