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10/31/2004 Archived Entry: "Favorite Turkish Restaurants"

I’ll stick my neck out here. Ali Baba, a Turkish restaurant at 212 E. 34th St., near Third Ave. (212-683-9206) has the best lahmajun in the city. I suppose I haven’t stuck it out that far. There aren’t that many Turkish restaurants that make lahmajun, although it is a totally standard dish, a street food in Istanbul, a flatbread with a spiced minced lamb and onion topping. The recipe varies. It’s often called Turkish pizza. I eat it whenever it is on a menu at a Turkish restaurant, and I try to get to any Turkish place I hear about, which is many. And so I can say, with reasonable assurance and authority, that the thin and beautifully seasoned lahmajun at this midtown Manhattan restaurant – where all the other food is excellent -- is the best I’ve had. I even took a few home, refrigerated them, and ate them two days later. Even then were the best.

I was introduced to Ali Baba by Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn’s Borough President, and his wife Jamie. Even though our own borough has quite a few Turkish restaurants, and some of them excellent, we schlepped into Manhattan for this one. Marty’s driver, Altai, is Turkish and he scouts Turkish restaurants for Marty. He and Marty love this one, so he thought I should try it, too. (We also bumped into Altai’s brother, sister-in-law, and baby at the restaurant. It ends up his brother was my neighbor in Tudor City. New York can be such a small town.) Actually, I had been to Ali Baba before, when it was in the storefront next door and not a full-scale restaurant, but more like a pizzeria. Their specialty was the lahmajun, and various stuffed pide, pide being the word for a particular Turkish bread – not pita, but a long, flatbread with a distressed surface, or baked in a boat-shape with various fillings.

There is, in fact a Brooklyn contender to Ali Baba’s lahmajun. I still love and adore and frequently eat the lahmajun at Taci’s Beyti, my favorite kebab house in Brooklyn, at 1955 Coney Island Ave., near Avenue P (718-627-5750). And I still frequent Taci’s not only for lahmajun, but for their superb pide (bread) baked with a custard-like egg and feta filling, and the best Adana kebab (grilled on a flat skewer), Beyti kebab (round, and spicier than Adana), and Iskender kebab. Iskender kebab is the most elaborate kebab; actually a dish made with spit-cooked ground meat, the Doner kebab. Doner is the meat that is cooked on the big vertical spit (like Greek gyro) and served in thin slices. To become Iskender kebab it is layered on top of fried bread with both a yogurt sauce and a tomato sauce. It can be heavy, greasy and bitingly acidic. At Taci’s it is rich and divine.

Then … there’s Liman, another excellent Turkish restaurant in Brooklyn, at 2710 Emmons Ave. (718-769-3322), right on the marina side of the street in Sheepshead Bay. I go to Liman when I want simple fresh fish – we order a bunch of appetizers, then the fish.

Don’t tell me about Sahara, 2337 Coney Island Ave. (718- 376-8594). I know all about Sahara, which was probably the first of the Turkish restaurants in Brooklyn, and has grown so much that it is now the most famous. I like Sahara well enough. It’s a scene and I love the people watching. The food is good enough. It’s just not as good as at Taci’s or Liman.

In case you didn’t know, Sheepshead Bay and neighboring areas have had a Turkish restaurant explosion in recent years. The Russian community loves Turkish food, and you can go to a Turkish restaurant and hear only Russian spoken – even some of the waiters lately are Ukrainian or Russian. Under Soviet rule, Russia became a nation enamored with Georgian food, by which I mean the Republic of Georgia, a country in the Caucuses with a cuisine inspired by the Ottoman Turks. In Soviet days, when food was scarce, Georgia, which is a fertile land with a temperate climate accommodating to many crops, became the epitome of gastronomy in the cold northern climate of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Book Report

Word from my publisher is that my new book – Arthur Schwartz’s New York City Food -- left the warehouse on Friday and is heading for bookshelves everywhere. If you pre-ordered the book through Amazon or another internet bookstore, it should be arriving very soon. Give it at least two weeks to get to a store near you. If you want to buy one when and where I can sign it, check out the appearance page on this site. I will be appearing all over the metro area starting next week and continuing almost to Christmas.