After nearly seven months of eating mostly my dad’s home-cooked meals, I was dying to eat out. There are so many food choices in Beijing, so I didn’t expect that the first restaurant I’d walk into would be a Turkish one. I’d never eaten Turkish food before, we were still worried about the pandemic, and my dining companion was my equal parts picky and paranoid 13-year-old sister. When we sat down at Turkish Feast, I got a little bit more worried when I saw no pictures on the menu and a lot of words I didn’t recognize. But, when the food came, all our worries melted away.
First came the appetizer. They call it the mezze plate (RMB 98), but it looked like a painter’s palette with three generous bowls of colorful dips. The familiar hummus, made from chickpeas, tahini, lemon juice, and olive oil, was so good that even if I ate nothing else after it, I’d leave a satisfied customer. The spicy mezze, so red you might be afraid to touch it, was mild enough that even someone with my low spice tolerance could enjoy the tomato and pepper mixture. And the Turkish carrot tartare was a surprise. The texture felt more like a salad than a dip, with its shredded carrots folded into a cooling homemade yogurt sauce. Though the mezze plate comes with a basket of warm bread, we soon found ourselves eating it directly out of the bowls with a spoon.
Then came the Pide and Adana kebabs. Pide (RMB 98) is a crispy, deliciously cheesy, elongated version of the pizza, divided into four sections and respectively topped with spinach, beef, cheese, and Kiymali, a kind of ground meat. The beef section was our favorite and my sister tried to steal my slice.
The assorted kebab plate (RMB 98) was the perfect introduction to Turkish meats. Contrary to what the name suggests, Adana kebabs do not come on sticks. Instead, the slices of beef, chicken, and lamb are laid out on a platter. The chicken kebab was so tender you hardly even had to chew it. The two of us wolfed it down, despite our promise to save a bite for our dad when he came to pick us up.
But it was the lamb that blew us away! The Turkish styled lamb (RMB 108) is slow-cooked for five hours before being covered in an array of spices and served with a special Turkish rice called bulgur pilaf. The outside skin is deliciously crisp and salty, pairing excellently with the tender meat and rice. I never appreciated the phrase “the meat came right off the bone” until our server took the lamb leg in one hand, a spoon in the other, and separated tender meat from bone in one smooth stroke.
We were in food heaven.
The food was so good that a regular diner even stopped by our table to say that, as someone who’s lived in Turkey for four years, this was the most authentic Turkish restaurant in Beijing and that he’d been coming here almost every day since he discovered it a couple of weeks ago.
Because that’s what good food does: it connects people. Restaurant manager Muhammet Annayev’s dream to study abroad first led him to Beijing from Turkmenistan, and he then entered the restaurant business with a friend to bring Georgian cuisine to China. After the success of his first restaurant Georgia’s Feast, he decided to branch out and start Turkish Feast to introduce authentic Turkish food to Beijing in a combination of fine dining and family-friendly eating.
The restaurant struggled during what Annayev called the “four horrible months” of the COVID-19. He returned alone to Beijing after the spring break to keep it open while his family remains in Kazakhstan, where they had to celebrate his youngest son’s second birthday without him.
It is because of the sacrifices made by restauranteurs like Annayev and countless dream-seekers like him that we don’t need to leave our homes but can still travel the world, through the diversity of food in our own city.
Thanks to them, we can afford to forget about the pandemic (even if it’s just for a few hours). That’s the power of a good meal. Even my little sister understood that. She said it so well: “For a second I thought everything went back to normal.”
Turkish Feast
115, 1/F, Shang, 20 Xinyuan Xili, Chaoyang District
朝阳区新源西里20号金尚一层115号 (6468 8321)
KEEP READING: Dumplings: Showing Love Through Food
Photos: Uni You
This article appeared in the beijingkids 2020 August issue
