GIMME MORE TURKEY
By Naomi Wise

San Diego Reader
Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Pasha drew my eye with an ad in this paper, including a coupon for
a freebie appetizer platter. Hmm…a new bargain destination? Worth
trying? I scurried to the website and found that the restaurant
wasn’t just another generic Mediterranean eatery but specifically
Turkish. Now that’s something fresh! (There’s also the charming
Bird House Grill in Encinitas, and a doner-kebab joint downtown,
but that’s about it for Turkish, far as I know.) The menu revealed
standard Middle Eastern dishes, but also several distinctly Turkish
specialties I’d never encountered before – two salads, three entrees,
a dessert. Good enough for a start. And this would be third in a
row for an exploration of new or newish restaurants serving various
global forms of "barbecue," after Southern and Japanese, and leading
right in to July 4. Posse roundup time!

Several of my friends have traveled in Turkey. They’ve come back raving
about their trips but not so much about the food. Still, knowing a
trifle about Turkish history, I’m curious about the cuisine. First
off, Turks are not generic "Middle Easterners," even if they share a
common religion in Islam. They don’t speak Arabic (a Semitic language)
but the totally different Turkish (a Ural-Altaic Turkic language,
most closely related to Azeri and Uzbek). Their location and ecosystem
tie them to Asia Minor (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, etc.), Persia,
and the Adriatic Sea, rather than the Mediterranean Arab world –
think snow, not sand.

And when the Ottoman Empire swept through the rest of Asia Minor
en route to Greece, its military fell in love with Armenian food
(same as me) and scooped up large numbers of Armenians to serve as
army cooks while they were conquering the world. Greece gained an
infusion of fresh recipes from Armenia, shaping the Greek cuisine
we know today, but traditional Greek dishes also gained worldwide
currency, especially their ancient masterpiece of stuffed grape leaves
– now best known by the Turkish word dolma. One end result of all
this conquest was the settling of a huge Armenian population in the
city of Izmir, which became the "cuisine capital" of Turkey, after a
fashion, spreading its culinary influence (at least until the whole
Turkish-Armenian thing went horribly tragic, as the empire rotted,
but I’m not going to go into that in a restaurant review…). What
other influences did the Turks pick up in their conquests and meld
into their own cuisine? Inquiring minds want to know.

When we arrived at Pasha, we found a medium-small room with dark
tablecloths, paper napkins, walls painted a light terra cotta and
hung with a spare but beautiful collection of Turkish handicrafts. The
restaurant is owned by a youngish couple, the husband from Lebanon and
the wife from Turkey. Both do some cooking and some serving. But the
night we ate there, most of the Turkish dishes – the malatya (Turkish
potato salad), the etli borek (meat pie), and the spinach borek – were
all unavailable; they just hadn’t been prepared for a midweek night.

We began with the vegetarian meze platter, for which we had
the coupon. Everything on it was very pleasant, especially the
lively tabouli and the light, faintly smoky baba ghanoush. (A
typo on the website spells it "Babagannosh," which sounds like
Turkish/Russian-Yiddish for "Grandpa’s getting a snack.") None of
the appetizers on the platter seems uniquely Turkish, or in any way
different from every other meze platter in town. Be sure to save some
of the cacik (pronounced "jah-jik," the Turkish version of Greek
tzatziki or Indian cucumber raita) and the garlic-yogurt sauce for
your main courses, as dips for your grilled meats.

We also ordered the Turkish Shepherd Salad (coban salatasi) –
diced tomatoes amended by cukes, scallion, onions, parsley, and
bell pepper in a lemon vinaigrette, topped with a light snowfall of
feta cheese. The tomatoes are under a lot of pressure to perform in
this dish, and sad to say, they didn’t: They were nearly tasteless,
hard supermarket-style globe tomatoes, and June is not yet their
season. The dressing needed more acidity for "oomph" to compensate for
their blandness. "This time of year," said Marty, "the only tomatoes
worth anything are little ones, cherry or grape tomatoes." "Yeah,
even if you leave the regular ones on the counter, they never ripen
and sweeten," added the Lynnester. Oddly, the leftovers of this salad
improved greatly during two nights in the fridge, allowing the dressing
to soak in and saturate the veggies.

The best of our entrees by far was a Turkish specialty, Ali Nazik. It
features small, richly seasoned cubes of charbroiled beef served on a
warm bed of tart, creamy patlican (pronounced "PAHT-lee-jahn") salad,
mashed eggplant mixed with yogurt and plenty of garlic. It comes with
grilled tomato and grilled slices of slightly spicy red pepper. It
all works together, with a fine contrast between the chewy, salty
meat and lush, garlicky eggplant. (The eggplant is also available
separately on the meze list.) "I’d come back for this dish," said
Lynne, who lives nearby, and probably will do just that.

Shrimp kebabs came in second. The shrimps were well seasoned if quite
salty, and reasonably tender. Like nearly all other entrees, they
were accompanied by fluffy basmati rice, pita, hummus (standing in
for the baba ghanoush promised on the menu with the seafood dishes),
and the fine house salad, a lively mixture of greens, tomatoes, cukes,
onions, and (in this plate alone) a few whole basil leaves.

The lamb shish kebab was flavorful with a marinade and charring, but
dry and rather tough. It set Marty, Dave, and me to reminiscing about
Sayyat Nova, an exquisite Armenian restaurant in Greenwich Village,
way back when I was a teen beatnik, thrilled to taste this new cuisine
with my dad and stepmom. That restaurant’s rendition had a subtle,
garlic-perfused olive-oil marinade for large leg of lamb chunks charred
outside but rosy inside. At Pasha, the chunks are smaller and cooked
medium (pinky-brown) inside, and the marinade is more assertive,
possibly, judging by the result, including an acidic, tenderizing
component like lemon juice. "I think the meat’s been marinated too
long," said Dave. "The texture on the exterior, just under the char,
is a bit mealy." "And the lamb doesn’t have much lamb flavor," Marty
observed. "I don’t know whether that’s because it’s cooked too well
done or if the lamb itself is lacking."

Unable to fulfill our hopes of a borek, we asked the owner whether
the gyro meat in the Iskender (doner) kebab plate was house-made
or bought. Bought, alas. Instead, the owner persuaded us to try a
shawarma. Because this is a newbie restaurant with not much volume
yet, the traditional shawarma of a huge hunk of flesh rotating on a
vertical spit has proven impractical. "Instead, I cut it in slices,
so the delicious marinade goes all through the meat, then I charbroil
the slices," he said. We chose beef shawarma over the alternative
chicken breast, which dries out too easily. But the beef proved just
as dry. "It’s almost like jerky!" Lynne said. "You can’t even taste
the marinade, just the charring," said Dave. Dipping the slices in
cacik or garlic sauce left over from the appetizer platter helped,
but only a little.

There are two desserts. The house-made baklava is flaky and nutty
(with both pistachios and walnuts) but sparing on the honey syrup –
much less sweet than standard versions. "I like this a lot," said
Lynne. "It’s not overwhelming." Kunafa is genuinely exotic, a large
wedge-shaped pastry with delicate top and bottom crusts of crunchy
farina flakes, sandwiching a filling of melted mild cheeses (mozzarella
and Jack or Havarti, or another cheese of that ilk). It’s topped with
crumbled pistachios, lightly dressed with fragrant rosewater-scented
sugar syrup, and is barely sweet at all. It’s like a cheese course
and a dessert all in one.

The Turkish coffee was strong and a little bitter, with all the "mud"
hiding at the bottom of the cup. It comes unsweetened. We stirred in
sugar with our fork handles (no spoons provided – yeah, it’s still
a start-up).

Bottom line: Pasha is indeed a bargain. With the coupon for a
free appetizer platter, the bill came to $28 per person total,
all inclusive. But I feel the restaurant isn’t making the most of
its greatest potential strength. Generic Middle Eastern restaurants
are a dime a dozen, some cheaper than this and some offering easier
parking. In order to compete, the Turkish dishes that distinguish
Pasha from the crowd should be available all the time, and I’d also
like to see more of them, if the Ali Nazik – outstanding hit of our
dinner – is any example. Then there’d be a reason to come back over
and over and explore what could be a unique menu. Hey, flaunt it if
you’ve got it, baby!