Babasco is the third Turkish restaurant to open in the Brighton/Brookline area in the last couple of years. I don’t know the sociology of this, but it doesn’t matter so long as they keep coming. Turkish food is good, filling, cheap, and sometimes very exciting. Actually, Babasco is like the grandchild who revives the culture, since it’s a spin-off of the nearby Angora Café, which is Turkish in name and extensive yogurt offerings, but sells mostly pizzas and such. All the food at Babasco is Turkish except for some of the sodas, and on several visits we couldn’t find a weakness.

For example, you could start with a big bowl of lentil soup ($3), served with slices of lemon, which improve it and bring out the undertone of caraway. The lahmajun ($2.95) is like the lahmajuns sold in Armenian groceries in Watertown — a kind of thin flatbread with an herbal meat topping — but here it’s much spicier and sold with a small salad, so some people will make it a lunch.

However, it’s very hard to pass up the combination appetizer ($7.95), which lets you choose three or four hot and cold items. These start with the familiar Turkish shepherd’s salad ($2.95; $3.95/large) with a decent winter tomato, good cucumber, onion, green pepper, and plenty of chopped parsley whose flavor is brought out by a dressing of real lemon juice and olive oil. A white-bean salad, piyaz ($2.95/$3.95), also benefits from fresh parsley, onion, and real lemon juice. So does the hummus ($2.95/$3.95). I wasn’t crazy about the baba ghanoosh ($3.25/$4.95) on two tries, however; it tasted more like sesame tahini on both occasions.

That was surprising because this cuisine and this restaurant are so good with every other form of eggplant. A fried-eggplant appetizer on the same cold table ($3/$4.95) was a little oily but full of eggplant flavor and very nice. And a daily special on Patlican kebab ($7.95) was one of the best eggplant dishes ever: melting rounds stuffed with onions and a rich flavor suggesting soy sauce, topped with a grilled pepper (though not as hot as the grilled peppers at the Family Restaurant, another Turkish place in Brookline). I also had a meat version of this, which wasn’t quite as amazing, but heartier.

Back to the combination appetizer, a reviewer’s friend that I visited twice. One of the most intriguing items is kisir ($2.95/$3.95), a wheat salad like tabouli, but made from cooked steel-cut wheat (rather than soaked, pre-cooked bulgur wheat) and bright red with Aleppo pepper. Aleppo is a chili naturalized in Syria that has a little bite with a rich flavor more like spice or fruit than bell peppers, although some green bell pepper and onion also get into kisir. The grape leaves ($1.25/$3.95/$4.95) are fat, meaty, and strongly flavored with cinnamon. The appetizer tables vary, and sometimes have falafel, feta salad, red-bean salad, and leek stew.

You can see why a lot of people never get past Middle Eastern appetizers, but Turkish food is also the mother cuisine of kebabs, where even a stuffed eggplant dish you could never get on to a skewer is called a kebab. Real kebabs, grilled on flat skewers over a live-fire gas grill, are the stars of Babasco.

Again, I resorted to the mixed grill ($12.95) to get tastes of three of the kebabs. The clear winner is döner kebab ($4.95/sandwich; $9.95), the original gyro and shwarma, and here made from real strips of beef and lamb, not loaf, and grilled to a real crust on a proper vertical rotisserie. The mixed grill also came with a skewer of chicken chunks ($4.95/$9.95), broiled to a slight char, and another of classic lamb-chunk shish kebab ($4.95/$9.95), more effectively marinated. Catching my enthusiasm, the chef added a few pieces of chicken adana kebab ($4.95/$9.95), a spiced ground chicken like a milder version of the Indian and Pakistani seekh kebab.

The real adana kebab ($4.95/$9.95) is a mixture of ground lamb and beef with spices, the effect being to enhance the beefiness. I’d rate it my second-favorite kebab at Babasco. As dinners, kebabs come with a good heap of imported Turkish rice (medium-grain pilaf with a slightly fragrant aroma), a couple of irresistible hot pita breads, and a salad of greens, red cabbage, and sliced onion, topped with a sprinkle of Aleppo pepper. Double starch seems to be an essential feature of Turkish cuisine, and this column may start to suggest it for all ethnic cuisines. The sandwich versions are stuffed into one pita, with a smaller salad, and are certainly the best buys for normal appetites.

In addition to bottled water and American soda, Babasco has a full line of Turkish sodas (lemon, mandarin, orange) and fruit drinks. I tried a cola called Camlikh Ülker ($1.75). Ayran ($1) in cups is described as a yogurt drink but tastes like mild buttermilk and is very refreshing. Turkish coffee ($2) is a tiny cup of thick stuff. One puts in lots of sugar (or here they actually offer you Splenda!) and drinks off the top of it. You can swirl the muddy stuff at the bottom and turn the cup upside down for a while, then read fortunes in the patterns of the grounds.

It’s a drink that seems to call forth intensely sweet desserts, and Babasco has some as familiar as baklava ($2.95) and kadaif ($3.29) — the shredded form of baklava with more pistachios and walnuts but just as much honey. Novel — to me at least — is sekerpare ($2.95), a pair of objects the shape and size of ladyfingers, but heavy with caramel syrup.

Babasco is set up like a cafeteria, but though you order and pay in advance, any serious quantity of food will be brought to your table and you may even earn a visit from the chef-owner in his red toque. There is plastic flatware and shakers of salt and pepper at a station near the handful of tables, but again, serious food will call forth metal flatware. The room is long and thin, but modernly done up in bare brick, fake wood floors and tables, and several flat-screen TVs playing Turkish-language cable news. (For this they were required to get an entertainment license.)

Service is rudimentary, with one grill chef and one counterperson, but anyone who shows an interest in the food can get some explanations and table service unless the restaurant is very busy. In my experience the regular menu is almost 100 percent available, while the list of daily specials — two dishes for each day of the week — is more like a typical third-world menu listing everything the kitchen could possibly make, of which one or two random dishes are actually in stock on a given day.

n

In a recent column on Smith & Wollensky, I identified a crab body section with claws, part of an enormous seafood appetizer, as spider crab. This drew a correction from the restaurant’s seafood supplier, who said it was a Dungeness crab cluster. There is no commercial fishery for spider crabs.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com.