It's a shame that, to most New Zealanders, Turkish food is synonymous with the doner kebab. An invention of Turkish immigrants in Germany, it is very popular in northern Europe and the favoured pre- and post-match dining option for thirsty football fans in the UK.
The popularity of Istanbul as a tourist destination has created a doner kebab industry in the Turkish capital, too, but it's a bit like a pizza joint in Naples adding pineapple or spaghetti to the margheritas to cater to Kiwi appetites: I doubt that a self-respecting Turk would eat that minced composite meat, like savoury fibreboard, carved from the vertical spit. Indeed the street sellers near the Bosphorus commonly express their contempt for English appetites by including some cold chips.
Mercifully, this monstrosity is nowhere to be found on the menu at Feriza's, the newest Turkish restaurant in town, though they do offer kebabs, in the sense of meats on a skewer, if that tickles your fancy.
The cuisine of the eastern Mediterranean has lifted its game in Auckland beyond the kebab in the past year or so. Beirut, Gerome and Lokanta are all recent arrivals that give more or less good accounts of the food of the region.
Feriza's, the new venture from the folks behind Deco in Titirangi and Bodrum in New Lynn, is, like those two places, a perfectly adequate, if not particularly distinguished, addition to the roll call. Or it will be when it sorts its service out. The night we turned up they had locked the door against a howling gale but no one thought to keep an eye out for bedraggled would-be customers, who were reduced to patrolling the perimeter, noses pleadingly pressed against the glass, until someone noticed.
Feriza's restaurant. Photo / Getty Images
Once inside, it was little better. At the end of the evening, I felt like presenting them with a bill for staff training since I had expended so much effort in suggesting the clearing and wiping of tables. Most irritatingly, dishes for a group of four came with two bits of bread - and when I asked for two more, I was given four and billed $5.
We sampled so freely from the top half of the extensive menu, we ate only one dish from what might be called the mains list: a seafood guvech, which is an oven-baked stew similar to ratatouille. It was made more like that vegetarian classic by virtue of there being so little kai moana in it. I could detect no fish and if there was a mussel, it disappeared before I got there, though tasteless and limp squid rings abounded.
The lahmajun, the thin, crispy pizza topped with spiced meat, was very poorly discharged, too. The blistering heat needed to virtually fuse the topping to the dough, had not been applied, and thus the (rather bland) ground meat tended to roll up like a carpet and slide off.
But smaller, snackier dishes were generally pretty good: cauliflower fritters, greaselessly deep-fried, came with tzatziki; octopus was charred and chewy, though vastly outgunned by the bed of cold potato it came on; a dish of spinach with a yoghurt topping was much more spinach than the standard, although that was no bad thing; and the baba ganoush was decently smoky.
You get the idea: there's nothing here to frighten the doner kebab fan, but likewise, anyone who has sampled the food at Ciya Sofrasi in Kadikoy (google it) will come away uninspired. It's a tourist-precinct eatery and expectations should be adjusted accordingly.
