Oklava, 74 Luke Street, London EC2 (020 7729 3032). Meal for two, with drinks and service: £80
If you happened to be terribly smug and decided to prove the irritating depths of your London restaurant knowledge by coming up with a place that ticked every box marked cliché, it would look like Oklava. You would start with a young cook, fêted in various head-chef roles, who has since spent a period out of captivity, cooking at pop-ups and supper clubs and building a devoted fanbase along the way. You would give her a style of food that draws on a distinct cultural heritage, ideally one that’s a bit peasanty and involves ingredients so esoteric you have to Google their names. Oh, and it would have to be a style of food which hasn’t been completely done to death by everyone else.
There should be a charcoal grill involved, because that marks out the place as authentic – gas and electricity being for lightweights. Then you would write a menu dominated by small sharing plates, which come out of the kitchen in the order that suits the cooks, because that whole starter-main-course thing is so terribly bourgeois and Western European and uptight. Give it a country-specific wine list, and an east London postcode, and there you have it: Oklava, where much-adored chef Selin Kiazim draws on her Turkish-Cypriot heritage to explore the food of Turkey, with a few modern twists.
If I sound horribly cynical, regard it as a pathetic defence mechanism. Kiazim has clearly worked very hard to build up that fanbase. Likewise, the restaurant she has created, on a tight corner site in Shoreditch, decorated in muted shades of greys and creams, has a sweet, warm buzz to it. It is the sound of young people working their hearts out to bring their distinct offering to a London ever hungry for new tastes. This means that any criticisms I make are always going to risk looking mean-spirited. Then again if I were really so worried about what people thought of me I would probably have chosen a less frowned-upon career, perhaps euthanising stray kittens. Plus, a full meal with wine will cost £40 a head.
I know a little about Turkey’s food, having spent many summers there, on the coastal fringes. Its big virtue is its bi-curious approach to the whole meat-vegetable divide. The Turkish culinary repertoire is big on lamb: slow roasted, fast grilled, minced down and spiced up for kofta. I’ve written before about the joys of a restaurant called Cimbal, an outdoor place near Fethiye, where you cook half an animal on your own tableside brazier that puffs thick blue ribbons of smoke at a canopy of vines. But Turkish food also pays serious attention to green leafy things, to the crunch and vibrancy of vegetables that have lived a longer, sweeter life beneath the sun. During our holidays in the hills above Fethiye we would always make an excursion to the utilitarian cafés at the bus station, for glorious lahmacun – thin wood-fired flatbreads spread with tomatoes and minced lamb, to be eaten rolled around fresh herbs and pickles – and killer doner kebabs with the crunch of salads.
The menu at Oklava has echoes of some of this, but clearly has more rugged interests, too. A few of the dishes we try are very pleasing. In 2015 the humble cauliflower was finally given its chance to shine, at places like Palomar and Berber & Q, both also drawing on an eastern Mediterranean tradition. Here, hunks of cauliflower are roasted with a mild paste of bashed chillies and slathered with red onions, parsley and pistachios. There’s also a little chilli in the tomato sauce coating roasted prawns, just demanding to have their heads sucked so the sweetness of both the tomatoes and the seafood can get to know each other intimately.
These are the bright, sunlit spots. After that it all gets rather heavy. The problem is the drying effect of two ingredients: nuts and yogurt. The latter is, I think, meant to bring acidity and lubrication to the dishes it touches; instead, it blankets them. Lamb breast is slow cooked then given a crisp pomegranate glaze. It’s the kind of thing I would normally get armpit deep in, relishing the interplay of meat and hot fat and crisp exterior. But the ballast of yogurt smothers it all and makes it less than itself.
There’s the same problem with what’s described as a pide of spiced short rib. Pides are oval pizza-like flatbreads coming to a point at each end, thinly topped, and often sold from roadside shacks in Turkey for a few coins. Here that word is reinterpreted to mean a small flatbread boat, turned up at the edges so it can take the filling which, again, like the lamb, is dulled by too much yogurt. You are left not with the flavour of spiced beef, but the lactic acidity of the dairy. There’s also a restrained hand on that spicing, as if the kitchen desperately doesn’t want to offend.
The lack of chilli hit with the cauliflower and prawns is a surprise. When it’s repeated with the “spicy” short rib, which really isn’t, it’s a disappointment. As it is again with under-cooked fried Cyprus potatoes that are meant to come with chilli salt, but really don’t. Muhammara is traditionally a red pepper spread with walnuts. Here, it majors more on the nuts than the vegetables and while there is a great aromatic punch, the impact when spread on toast is again simply drying.
The problem here is cumulative. Taken alone each of the dishes I’ve been picky about might have warranted a happy nod. Together they build up to a set of less-than-satisfying flavours which begin to merge into each other. This is one of the downsides of kitchens sending out dishes in any order, however laid-back and cool it may seem. Ordering dishes gives the kitchen the opportunity to orchestrate flavours, to give a meal ebb and flow.
Happily, desserts do come at the end, though they should be classed as assemblies: a dry pistachio sponge with a mildly cloying white chocolate mousse and some barbecued quince; a pleasant enough yogurt and honey parfait. A modern approach to the sweet end of the meal is fine, though I would have loved perhaps one example of the syrup-soaked pastries for which Turkey is rightly renowned.
Clearly Oklava has virtues. It has a distinct sense of self, which is an important quality. Right now, though, it feels very much like a work in progress rather than the finished article.
Jay’s news bites
■ When Alan Yau, the man behind Wagamama and Hakkasan, leaps on a food trend you know it’s a thing. So it is with Turkish food. Alongside his recent big Chinese openings comes the much quieter Babaji on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue. It specialises in pide, topped with the likes of caramelised onions, with walnuts and cheese, as well as the classic tomato with minced lamb (babaji.com.tr)
■ Jacob Kenedy’s semi-fast food-style Italian eatery Vico, on London’s Cambridge Circus, reviewed here in October, has been re-launched. The confusing counter service has been replaced by standard table service and a trattoria-style menu which now include pastas and grills. I wish him well (eatvico.com).
■ It’s clearly going to be a DIY Christmas. Four of the five bestselling products in the meat section of Amazon’s grocery are hog casings, for people desperate to make their own sausages. Number one is the 5m all-natural hog casing from Butchers Sundries, yours for £2.98.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
