Take a walk along Green Lanes, a seemingly nondescript stretch of main road that slices through northeast London, and the scent of smoky charcoal soon becomes intoxicating. It unfurls from within the many ocakbaşıs (grill houses) and kebab shops that occupy the street’s small, brightly lit storefronts, where hulks of meat spin majestically on skewers and freshly-made pide is methodically slid in and out of ovens. This strip may look like a disorderly milieu of takeout spots best intended to serve late-night drinkers. But any Londoner well versed in their city’s cultural fabric knows that the burning of the mangal grills here is a piece of living, edible, history – and one linked to decades of Turkish and Kurdish migration to the capital.
I first experienced this side of London at age 13, on New Year’s Eve – an evening marked by the rich flavours of a lamb kebab my parents ordered and a rambunctious waiter who drank so much that he attempted to lift a table up with his teeth. We still talk about that waiter to this day, but otherwise, nothing felt remarkable about being another Turkish-British family in London, bidding farewell to one year and optimistically raising our glasses to the next. My father is originally from Adana in the south, and like many children of a diaspora, it’s taken me a long time to develop a curiosity about the side of myself I didn’t feel rooted in. On recent visits to Istanbul, I’ve begun connecting the city’s modern identity with that of my own, but time and distance from London have allowed me to see that cultural touchstones were never far from home. The Turkish community in London extends far beyond Green Lanes, too, down into Dalston – and now, a breadth of new flavours has emerged, thanks to a proliferation of contemporary Turkish restaurants in recent years.
Ferhat Dirik, who runs Mangal II in Dalston, is another second-generation immigrant who has only recently begun forging a path to understand his own heritage – although his journey has been more pre-determined than mine. The son of Ali Dirik, a chef who moved from Anatolia in the 1980s and opened Mangal Ocakbaşı (named after the traditional charcoal cooking method), followed by Mangal II in 1994, Ferhat took over the operations of the latter in 2015 and began to enmesh himself with Turkish cuisine in a deeper way. “For years I had travelled everywhere but Turkey,” he says. “Maybe it was an age thing, maybe it was an identity thing. Then, of course, I learned that Istanbul is the best city in the world, and there are many Turks there who share the same values and ideals as Londoners. The more I realised that, the more connected I felt.”
In a storyline that could have been ripped straight from The Bear, he and his chef brother, Sertaç, in 2021 took on the challenge of reinventing a family-run restaurant cherished by locals for its consistency (artists Gilbert & George famously had dinner there every night, only switching to the original, now named Mangal 1, after the brothers “installed a music system”) and set out to create a more refined menu that reflected the new era of Turkish cuisine they were witnessing on their travels to Istanbul and other parts of the country. The menu still retains plenty of familiarity (pickles and smoked hummus in a pool of olive oil; red pepper dolma and yogurt) but tradition is now served with a pinch of innovation: cured mackerel, caught in British waters, is doused with peppery Anatolian flavors; mutton koftë sits atop grilled apple; cornish chicken is stuffed with garlic and Aleppo-spiced sausage.
“I think the Turkish population is increasingly open to displaying aspects of our cuisine that go beyond [kebabs] – which is a great thing when done right – because there is a lot more to Turkish culture,” says Ferhat. After decades of Turkish restaurants not being granted the same weight as other more Euro-centric counterparts – often considered more of a cheap eat than an elevated dining experience – Ferhat says, there is less of a need to prove their worth. Perhaps, in part, because the British palate has become more open-minded. “It’s an exciting moment for Turkish cuisine because the perception is changing,” he says. “We no longer have to sell ourselves short by charging less to be hospitable and accommodating, which is part of our culture and our dignity, but also expected of us. You don’t see Spanish restaurants offering free bread or free wine. We have to remain confident in our cuisine.”
The history of the Turkish community in London goes back to the 1960s, partly driven by the collapse of the textile industry, which led enterprising Turkish-Cypriots, Kurds, and Turks to see opportunity in an untapped corner of the restaurant industry. Now, a new generation of chefs are moving to the UK as economic crises and political instability in Turkey create roadblocks to their work. Civan Er, who founded Istanbul-based Yeni Lokanta (a Beyoğlu restaurant famed for its mantı), moved to London in 2021 to open his second location. Much like Ferhat, Er and his team take traditional Turkish cooking techniques and fuse them with locally-sourced ingredients (though he admits that he still buys his spices in Turkey and brings them back in his luggage). Case in point: Orkney scallops are served alongside spicy almond muhammara; veal sweetbreads and Karaağac chilis from Erdine in northwestern Turkey sit side by side on a plate.
The goal, says Er, is to show the geographical breadth of Turkish cooking, which extends far beyond the city limits of Istanbul—from Anatolia in the west to Gazantiep in the south—and also its potential. “[Yeni] is basically my take on Turkish cuisine,” says Er. “We use traditional [approaches] like an open fire but add our own twist. People have been cooking this food for thousands of years, so I’m not sure you can ever say something hasn’t been done before, but we try to do dishes that are new to ourselves.” Located in Soho, where there are fewer Turkish restaurants than in the north of London, Yeni remains an outlier in its neighbourhood, but the audience ranges from diners hailing from Turkey to “Londoners and clientele from all over the world,” says Er.
You’ll find a similarly diverse set of diners at Dükkan in Hoxton. Founded by Mustafa Yılmaz, Ali Yalçın, and Elif Gengor, Dükkan is less a conventional restaurant, and more an experimental space for hosting supper clubs and pop-ups that celebrate Turkish food and drink culture. Vibes are carefully curated: a tailor-made playlist acts as a soundtrack to evenings cultivated by guests like Turkish-Cypriot chef Meliz Berg or Lokanta Tokyo, a culinary project that fuses Turkish lokanta-style (the word used for home cooked) cuisine with Japanese ingredients and techniques; and the tiled white-and-green walls are reminiscent of many an Istanbul restaurant, while custom-designed menus and flyers act as keepsakes from an event. “There are lots of Turkish people out there with ideas for all kinds of food businesses, but with rents [in London] being so high, it’s impossible to scale,” says Yalçın. “We thought we could actually help chefs incubate their ideas by collaborating with them, and create a community along the way.”
Gengor notes that “Londoners, and not just those of Turkish heritage, are now realising that there is more to Turkish food than they’ve tasted before, and they want to experiment with it and try new things.” Whether that means bringing in Aegean olive oil provider Joila to provide the base for a playful pintxo night, or lokum purveyor Marsel Delights for a fresh take on the Turkish breakfast, the trio are using Dükkan to not just shine a light on the Turkish cuisine of the present, but consider what the future could look – especially with the confidence to eschew certain cultural expectations over what the food is supposed to be. “We are respectfully disrespecting some Turkish traditions and reimagining how the food could be prepared,” says Yalçın.
Some places remain unchanged, though. Walk into the original Mangal 1 on a Friday night and you’ll still find people from all walks of life sitting shoulder to shoulder, kilims hung on the wall behind them, weighing up whether to order the lamb shish or the Adana köfte. Gilbert & George will still be there early for dinner, and pubgoers will be walking in late for a kebab after last call. It’s not too different a scene from the ones Ferhat remembers of his childhood spent running around the restaurant in the 1990s, his father commanding the show. “It was split 50/50 between Turkish families and non-Turkish locals – lots of people from the art scene and the LGBTQ+ community. There was this lovely mesh of cultures,” he says. “It was always very London.”
Where to eat, according to the locals
“Ridley Road Market is a genuine market in London with some Turkish greengrocers,” says Civan Er. He also picks up freshly baked simit at Akdeniz Bakery in Stoke Newington and never misses the lahmacun at Antepliler in Haringey or sweet treats at Bebek Baclava in Dalston.
Ferhat Dirik loves to go to 01 Adana, which serves a hearty roster of lamb and chicken kebabs along with items like lamb liver over rice and quails grilled on a skewer: “It’s partly because my dad first worked there when he moved to the UK, but mostly because it’s delicious. I’m always craving and searching for those flavors.” And he always stops at “Haringey Corbacisi in Green Lanes for soups and wraps.”
“I love Yeni,” says Ali Yalçın, who regularly frequents Er’s restaurant, as well as The Counter, a small plate spot with locations in Soho and Notting Hill. And for a north London classic, he recommends “Üstün on Newington Green for the pide and lahmacun.”
This article was first published on Condé Nast Traveler.