Sultan's Kitchen

Our critic plays Ottoman umpire

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

Sultan's Kitchen 116 State St (Downtown), Boston Open for lunch Mon-Fri, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sat, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Closed Sun. No dinner. AE, MC, Visa Beer and wine No smoking (617) 728-2828 Counter at sidewalk level; dining rooms and bathrooms up a flight of stairs

There aren't many Turkish restaurants in Boston, but the award for staying power has got to go to Özcan Ozan, whose Sultan's Kitchen has been in business since 1981. If you've heard of Ozan but never seen his restaurant, that's not surprising: his book is widely available -- The Sultan's Kitchen, a glossy and extensive guide to Turkish food -- but his restaurant is easy to miss if you don't work downtown. Six days a week the place serves lunch, and that's it. No dinner, no breakfast, nothing on Sunday. As a reviewer with a day job in a different part of town, I've always found it hard to visit.

But a recent trip to Istanbul lit a fire under me to get to Ozan's restaurant, a freestanding two-story brick building across from the Wyndham Hotel. I found the owner himself behind the cash register, in an embroidered chef's jacket and a lush graying mane, barking orders and moving the line briskly along.

His restaurant, for all its ambition and reputation, is run like a take-out counter. You pay as you order, get your food in a white paper bag, and eat it wherever you want. There are a few tables near the counter on the first floor and more in the upstairs dining room, decorated with Turkish textiles, Ottoman calligraphy, and framed scenes of Turkish life.

A tourist brochure I read in Turkey a couple of weeks ago claimed that the world's three great cuisines are French, Chinese, and Turkish. Right, you're thinking: and the world's three great composers are Mozart, Beethoven, and Schnittke. Well, maybe. But the claim makes better sense if you think of "Turkish food" as the cuisine of the former Ottoman Empire -- as the whole range of Middle Eastern food from Persian to Greek. A lot of the foods we associate with better-known Mediterranean cuisines were born in present-day Turkey.

Still, Turkish is not one of the world's pretentious cuisines; it involves a lot of grilled meat (kabobs) and spreads, with yogurt as coolant. The country is a prodigious food producer, and one of the virtues of Turkish cuisine -- like Italian -- is that chefs tend to approach it by starting with good ingredients and then staying out of the way.

A classic Turkish technique is to grind meat, mix it with spices, shape it into a long finger, and grill it on a skewer. Done with lamb, this is called kofte (it's related to the kefte you see in Indian restaurants); with chicken, it's adana kabob. There are entire restaurants in Istanbul dedicated to kofte; they turn out plate after plate of finger-shaped meatballs. You can get a full lunch for two people at one of these joints, including salads and drinks, for about $8; that's about the price of the kofte plate for one person at Sultan's Kitchen. But then, the kofte here is fancy: instead of a pile of meatballs, it's two long strips of ground meat, grilled; we ordered the sandwich ($6.25; a plate with rice and greens is $9), which is served in a rolled pita with lettuce and a crisp salad of chopped pepper, cucumber, and red onion. The meat has a refined spiciness without losing the down-and-dirty fatty heft of ground lamb. The chicken-based adana kabob ($6.25 sandwich, $9 plate) was lighter in texture and considerably spicier, with some real chili wallop.

Ordinarily, Turkish cuisine isn't so spicy; there's more cooling than warming on most plates. Cacik ($3.50), for instance, is the classic cold yogurt soup, smooth and white, with bits of chopped cucumber; the predominant flavor, aside from the yogurt, is mint. Another soup is a fabulous rendition of egg-lemon ($3.50), common on Greek menus: this one was thick and tangy, with rice and shredded chicken for substance.

Appetizers are the fun part of any Mediterranean meal, and Sultan's Kitchen offers two meze plates --
appetizer selections -- for $7.75. One's available year-round: hummus heavy on the tahini, a very minty tabouleh, a couple of stuffed grape leaves, and some of the best baba ghanoosh I've ever had -- light and fresh and smoky. (I bought another pint on the way out.)

The other meze plate is very different in character: it's a selection of seasonal vegetables, which in itself is unusual. Mediterranean restaurants tend not to vary their menus much with the seasons: the cuisine is born of a consistent climate. Ozan, however, makes a point of changing his specials according to what's fresh (or perhaps what strikes his fancy), and serves the week's specials either on their own, or together on a sampler plate. Last week the seasonal plate came with delicious cold wilted spinach cooked with pine nuts; marinated artichoke hearts with peas and carrots; a salad of cold red beans (think fat, pink kidney beans) in a tomatoey sauce; a chopped salad of eggplant, zucchini, and peppers; and green beans tossed with bright-red diced tomato. It came with a big dollop of thickened yogurt.

We tried a few other things at Sultan's kitchen: a smallish Greek salad ($5.75) and something called "chicken dürüm" ($6.75, sandwich only), spiced chunks of grilled chicken rolled in a pita and accompanied by an excellent ratatouille-like stew of roasted eggplant, red pepper, and onion.

Aside from a selection of sodas and juice, there are a few Turkish drinks in the fridge: ayran ($1.50), a slightly salty yogurt drink; and Turkish soda ($1.25), a tasty canned drink in apricot or cherry. There's also Turkish wine, as well as raki, the anise-flavored national liquor.

For dessert there's the usual baklava and rice pudding, but we decided to try something stranger-sounding: the dessert of the day, a kind of custard "infused with resin of a small evergreen tree." The custard -- it came out of the fridge -- was light, and the resin not as detectable as the pistachios scattered across the top. Like the rest of the food, it was tasty and slightly unusual without being flamboyant. It was also, for what it's worth, more novel than almost anything I ate in Turkey.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.

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