Urfa Style Dinner Party Anyone?

As we left Mardin, I realized that Tekin’s pattern was to feel hungry and duck into the first restaurant he encountered. It didn’t seem to matter what was on the menu or what the atmosphere was. I guess it was a fast food mentality although the restaurants were certainly not party of any chain. I read through the restaurant section of the tour book for Mardin and noticed the experience we could have had and then searched for restaurants in Urfa which was our next destination. I noticed that there was a restaurant that “occupies a wonderful old Urfa house where you dine on floor cushions in a series of rooms set around a courtyard.” I have vivid memories of eating in such a room in the home of a Druze family in the village of Majd al-Shams in the northern Golan Heights and in a restaurant in Jerusalem and would like to create such a room someday so I recommended to the companions that we go there. I also determined that paying 2 or 3 dollars more for better food would help me as I scout out dishes that I would like to learn for a chapter on Turkish food in the next edition of my next dinner party cookbook.

Finding the restaurant in Urfa required a little of extra effort but the wandering paid off in that it lead us to a CD shop that had traditional Urfa style music CDs for 4 dollars each. I bought two and sensed that the Turkish dinner parties I will throw will be done Urfa style. When we reached the restaurant, we were initially disappointed. Rather than food served nearly instantaneously in the cheap restaurants on the corner, we had to wait for food to be prepared—and this after we found that various menu items were unavailable because the main cook was not there. It may have been because it was well after normal lunch time (two in the afternoon) and he was home taking a nap. But the wait was worth it. The food was excellent and I noted the name of the dishes to later search for the recipes—Bostan and Et Sote. I took some pictures of the rooms with pads around the walls and in a niche in the wall—I imagine stick some pillows and pads in a closet and set up the room for dinner parties and then clear it our for other uses.

Back in Istanbul, it finally sunk in that one of my favorite restaurants here features Urfa’s cuisine. It is even called Halil Ibraham—Halil means friend as Abraham is known in the middle east as the friend of God—I think that’s Biblical. Anyways, Hebron is also called Al-Khalil, which makes sense since it has the Tomb of Machpaleh where Abraham was buried. The restaurant had paintings of scenes from Urfa on the walls. I then noticed that other restaurants in the area mentioned Urfa and Tekin confirmed that this little corner of the Aksaray section of the old city of Istanbul, for some reason, features a concentration of restaurants from Urfa. I returned in search of Et Sote a few more times--once to the Aksaray neighborhood when I had some time alone as well as with the group in restaurants in other sections of the city, including one featuring cuisine from Hatay, which is near Urfa in southern Turkey. There, a sojourner had et sote with mushrooms which I liked even better. If anyone wants to get a taste of it before I refine the recipes and invite you all over, http://www.turkish-cuisine.org/english/ seems to have a good collection of turkish recipes.