This Turkish restaurant's food and service cannot disappoint. And that's also considering that I arrived with high expectations, as a self-proclaimed Berlin-Turkish-food-scene expert really wanted to check it out for the first time due to the wood-fired kebab spit. Overall a lovely place to sit down and enjoy an extended dinner (albeit a sober one as they did not have alcohol on the menu).
The upbeat, multi-lingual, and friendly service shined upon arrival, as they attempted to be helpful in English, Turkish, and German all at once (I'm racially ambiguous). We were able to choose our table and settle down before a server came to ask us if we had any questions, and then took our order.
We ordered two dishes which focused on the wood-fired, horizontal spit, kebap meat (it's normally vertically flamed with an electric grill) which was crispy on the outside and the tenderest, juicy, and most subtly flavorful meat hiding beneath the thin crust. All the dishes in the House Speciality section come with 3 skewers of meat, and they served them to us 1 skewer at a time as we finished one and the 2nd/3rd skewer came hot off the grill. The side vegetable were fresh and grilled, and I especially want to give praise to the grilled tomato.
As we were two large guys with a day-long lake adventure fueled appetite, we needed to order a lamacun as well, a Turkish "pizza". We underestimated the size of the portion, as it came with three "pieces", each of which almost the size of a thin crust regular pizza. The bread part was ultra thin and the flavors mild and delicious. There was a thin layer of meat on it that was just so delicate.
At the end we ordered a cheesy pastry called Kunefe, and I thought I'd died and gone to dessert heaven. I'm not 100% sure what this is, but it was a melted cheese, with honey, pistachio nuts, and some cream on top that just exploded with flavor when all those unrelated flavors combined. My dining mate said that the Kunefe was good, but there was still another place in Berlin that did it better. I didn't care though. This Kunefe is the first and best I'd ever had! read more