The Upper East Side's Turkish Newcomer
I live on the Upper East Side, but for all intents and purposes, I may as well live in New Jersey or Siberia. All my friends and colleagues these days either live or choose to congregate in the East Village, and for most of the time since I moved back to Manhattan from Washington, DC, six months ago, there's been no question about where we would all meet for dinner or drinks or meetings or whatever?downtown. To them, my neighborhood was nothing but a wasteland of luxury condos, side-street walk-ups and (barely) postcollegiate bars. But recently, on the advice of a friend, I started luring some of these people uptown for dinner, recommending they leave a trail of bread crumbs to help them find their way back to the 6 train and assuring them repeatedly that the fratboys who spill out of the 2nd Ave. bars are really the golden retrievers of Manhattan nightlife: big, sloppy and goofy, but utterly harmless. So far I've inspired two groups to make their way north. The first time, I brought a friend from Astoria and another from Bleecker St. to a local Japanese restaurant, which they enjoyed not so much for the food (which was quite nice) but for the sheer entertainment of watching me blithely consume a hundred dollars' worth of raw fish and then panic at the arrival of the bill.
The second of these visits, which could be the foundation of a "Neighborhood Exchange" program to shake New Yorkers out of their natural provinciality, took place last week, and was even more successful. Not only did I get citizens of three boroughs to come to a restaurant just down the street from me?I may never buy another MetroCard again if this keeps up?but I took what turned out to be a very successful chance on Sultan, a relatively recent Turkish newcomer to 2nd Ave.
For some reason, in a city of Indian and Vietnamese and Malay and Peruvian restaurants, Turkish food has gotten rather short shrift. Personally, the cuisine was never on my radar screen until several years ago when I lived in Turkey, as part of a study-abroad program in college, where I spent the better part of six months feasting six days a week on the creations of Huseyin, the chef at the villa where I was taking classes. During that time I discovered a world of Turkish soups, lamb dishes, stuffed peppers and seafood dishes, many of which would seem similar on the surface to many Mediterranean and Middle Eastern meals I'd had before in America but would turn out to have much more interesting, deep levels of spice and flavor. Certainly part of the credit for this goes to Huseyin's ability. The other factor at work was that, unlike in America, all the food had the local freshness of our region, and the lamb meat tasted of the wild herbs, such as thyme, that the animals grazed on. But when I came back to the U.S. after this trip looking to reprise these flavors, I was disappointed by the paucity of Turkish restaurants.
Which is why finding Sultan (emphasis on the second syllable), with its long menu of Turkish classics, was such a pleasure. The restaurant, which sits in the middle of a miniature restaurant row of mid-priced ethnic joints?there's supposed to be some good Afghani food a block or two away, but that's a subject for a future column?is well-lighted, though not blindingly so, with soft-yellow sponge-painted walls and vaguely Ottoman wrought-iron candle sconces. When the four of us tricked in around 7 o'clock on a recent Wednesday night, the place was empty, save for a trio of well-off oldsters who were discussing archaeology and trying to trump each other with their knowledge of obscure ancient cultures, likely gleaned from retirements spent traveling to various wildernesses under the auspices of alumni enrichment programs. As the first one there, I thought, Well, this isn't a good sign. A lifetime of restaurant-going had taught me that a sparsely populated dining room combined with a comprehensive menu was a recipe for trouble.
I needn't have worried, though: soon the dining room was half-full, my friends arrived and we were all tucking into plates of meze, or appetizers, with warm bread. Among the dishes we started with were sigara boregi, or phyllo dough wrapped around a cheese filling and fried?a Turkish classic. We also ate hummus, lightly fried calamari, eggplant salad and a chopped fried-liver dish. I sampled all but the latter-most of these; those I did taste were all good, flavorful and authentic interpretations of the dishes, and my friend Andy, who ordered the liver, pronounced it good.
We washed all this down with Efes?a Turkish pilsner that tastes almost exactly like Rolling Rock?and raki, a clear Turkish anise-based liquor that, like ouzo or pastis, becomes cloudy when mixed with ice and water, earning it the local nickname "lion's milk." It's potent but delicious stuff, and was the favorite tipple of Kemal Ataturk, the legendary founder of modern Turkey who secularized the nation, Westernized the alphabet and died of cirrhosis. More importantly to us, though, it's the perfect thing to sip with meze, and in towns along the Turkish coast where I used to live, men would stay up all night drinking the stuff, eating and talking (raki being a great, expansive tongue-loosener), and I soon felt like I was back on the Med.
After a while, our waiter took our meze plates (he had recommended a couple of them to us, and was right on the money with his picks) and it was time for the main course. While I went into the place fully expecting to order some lamb dish or other, I was tempted by the seafood specials, which included a whole fish baked in a salt crust?something I once had in Turkey and was blown away by?but settled on their swordfish kebab, which was a Huseyin specialty when the weather was warm and he could break out the grill. My companions ordered other dishes around the menu. Two of them ordered lamb dishes?one of them a lamb with okra (etli bamya), the other the adana kebab, a spicy skewered tube of ground lamb?and while neither of them had had Turkish food before, they both devoured every bite and vowed to come back. The lamb dishes were both excellent, and Andy, a Texan who loves both okra and hot sauce, didn't ask for Tabasco?a rare occurrence?commenting later that "the flavor was just mild enough not to scare anyone away, and even though it didn't have any heat, it didn't need any." The third of my companions, Theresa, ordered a vegetarian dish, sebzeli gumec, a mix of chunks of potatoes, string beans, carrots and zucchini, served in a flavorful tomato sauce. The vegetables were so tender they barely needed chewing. The swordfish kebabs, meanwhile, were meaty but tender, and grilled with tomatoes, lemons and bay leaves. They would have done Huseyin proud.
But besides the food, the other great thing about Sultan is the service. The waiters were all young guys from around Turkey who embodied the best elements of Turkish hospitality, recommending dishes and making everyone feel utterly at home?a style that might result in their being more solicitous than Americans are normally used to, but something that I would urge them not to change. (Indeed, the best indicator of this was that at Sultan, just as at every restaurant I ever ate at in Turkey, the hardest thing to get was the check, as the staff would have been just as happy to see us stay all night and drink tea.)
Though we ordered only two deserts?a baklava, which was a little hard for my taste, and kadayif, a shredded wheat dish with a sweet filling and sprinkled with cinnamon that turned out to be delicious, light and almost coconutty in its texture?they brought us a third, "honey balls," on the house. The balls, which can only be described as Turkey's far-superior answer to donut holes, were good, but by the end we were overwhelmed. We did our best to finish them (we couldn't) while they kept refilling our teacups, always making sure we were happy.
A little while before we hoisted ourselves, stuffed, out of our seats, I noticed a bright flickering coming from the kitchen, and became alarmed that there might be a fire going on. About a minute later, a trio of waiters emerged, carrying a platter holding the flaming, salted fish special, which they brought out to a neighboring table amidst many oohs and aahs. I'm glad the place didn't burn down, as I had originally feared; I know I'm going back, and I know now what I'm going to order.