Young Turks

By Paul Reidinger

THE TURKS, today's polite callers at the gates of the European Union, have not always been the continent's most welcome guests. In their guise as Ottoman imperialists, they ruled vast tracts of southeastern Europe – including Hungary, the Balkans, and, most notably, Greece – for centuries and were only kept out of the heart of the continent by a tremendous Hapsburg defense of Vienna in 1683. With that battle, the Turkish tide began to wash out, though like all receding tides it left plenty of itself behind: paprika as the principal seasoning of Hungarian cooking, for one thing, and a taste for moussaka among the embittered Greeks, for another.

Yes, Turkey had and has a mighty food culture. Much of the Topkapi Palace, onetime residence of the Ottoman emperors in Istanbul, is given over to immense kitchens filled with immense pots and pans, and, beyond the palace's walls, the rest of the city is fragrant with markets and spice markets and shops on narrow lanes selling shawarma. Turkish cooking is part of what we have taken to calling, rather haphazardly, "Mediterranean" cooking, a designation that tends to suggest such staples as yogurt, hummus, lamb, eggplant, dolmas, and baklava. Turkish cuisine does make liberal use of those foods, but it also has its distinctive emphases, including apple tea and cherries.

I found no cherries on the menu at Bursa Kebabs, a new West Portal restaurant a good many of whose customers seem to speak Turkish. No apple tea, either. But there were such excellent Mediterranean standards as falafel ($4.99), brightly seasoned and wrapped in lavash (which made it easier to eat, I thought), and beef shawarma ($5.99), also wrapped in lavash, burrito-style, and featuring well-seasoned meat as tender and savory as that from some little shop on one of those Istanbul back lanes that dive steeply toward the Golden Horn. (There the meat would almost certainly be lamb, of course.)

Less familiar, but irresistible, was haydari ($3.99), a blend of yogurt and feta cheese spiked with olive oil, garlic, paprika, and mint. It resembled a cross between cream cheese and tzatziki – the Greek condiment of yogurt, garlic, and cucumbers – and indeed a few cucumber coins were embedded upright in it, Stonehenge-style. More familiar was a lentil soup ($2.99), pureed to a rusty creaminess and sprinkled with paprika for a slight smoky kick.

The walls of Bursa are painted an elegant green – pistachio green, I realized when the baklava ($2.99) arrived under a sprinkling of chopped pistachio nuts. The phyllo dough could have been more tender, but the dish was sweetly heavy with honey, and of course the nuts on top added a splash of color all their own.

A la Turca, which opened about a year and a half ago in the Tenderloin, is perhaps not as handsome as Bursa, but it is handsome all the same: mocha rather than green and replete with its own contingent of Turkish speakers, for that note of authenticity. (The cheap-looking signage out front doesn't do the place justice, nor does the fake stone wall – like something lifted from the set of The Brady Bunch – at the rear of the dining room.)

The food is comparable to Bursa's in price, range, and quality. The lentil soup ($3.25), in fact, seemed virtually identical, apart from the dried mint served on the side at A la Turca. We found the phyllo dough to be equally tough, though this time the intransigent sheets were part of ispanakli borek, a spinach pie ($3.50) – better known in this country by its Greek name, spanikopita. The meat in the lamb shish kabob ($7.25) was, by contrast, ethereally tender, wrapped in lavash along with tomato, cucumber, romaine lettuce, onion slivers, and the indispensable tahini sauce. And a chicken-mushroom pides ($6.25) was notable less for its well-behaved fillings (the marquee entrants, plus onion and bell pepper) than for its envelope, a pita bread-like disk, though richer, puffier, and with a distinct sheen of pastry.

As a visitor to Turkey a few years ago, I was struck by the warm formality of the people. The Turks did not strike me as casual back-slappers (perhaps that reserve accounts for some of their difficulties with the more effusive Greeks); like the French, they seem to value a precision and correctness that nonetheless does not obscure the human element. Translated to an American restaurant setting, all this means service is (at both Bursa and A la Turca) something nearly ideal: attentive, prompt, warm but never intrusive. Dishes arrive at a well-considered pace, and emptied dishes are cleared almost unnoticeably.

Turkish food is, for the moment, still near enough to the margins of things to have escaped Californication or yuppification or whatever term we prefer to describe the process by which the ingredients, methods, and flavors of a faraway cuisine are given a polished representation as "California bistro" cooking. Not that this is necessarily bad: from Tallula to Destino to Alma, the technique has produced some of the most arresting food in the city. A Turkish bistro could well be a remarkable thing (and Bursa already has the look), not to mention an inevitable one.

Meantime, there is much to be said for the traditional foods, traditionally prepared and enjoyed while listening to people speaking the language of the old country. Of course I couldn't make out a word at either place, but I like to think they were talking about their ancestral land's rejection of a clumsy Bush attempt at bribery and an absurd war Turkey managed to stay out of.