MEZE MANGAL: NO MEZZIN'

One of the continuing quests of Dos Hermanos is to find a replacement ocakbaşi restaurant for the late, much missed Angel Mangal which quite simply did the best Turkish style mixed grill in London.

Some have come close: Testi was enjoyable with its smoky-flavoured meats and an interesting selection of lambs bits. Anatolia was even better with good fatty meat and generous portions. Some were poor or merely disappointing like the popular Mangals 1 and 2 in Stoke Newington which have always seemed a bit whitebread to us.

Meze Mangal has been on our radar for a while but its location (I mean, South of the river AND New Cross/Brockley borders??? It just ain’t gonna happen) mitigated against a visit, however the opening of the shiny new East London line meant journeying between the wilds of South East London and fashionable Shoreditch is now a doddle.

So it was that I found myself sitting outside The Talbot pub drinking a well-kept pint of Rudgate Ruby Mild with buddies Scott and Gavin – the latter who has now forsaken his preacher look for that of Mob accountant. He was very reluctant to remove his tie.

Meze Mangal is one of an anonymous strip of shops on the main drag and as we approached I did begin to wonder how well I’d chosen. Once inside though I felt immediately at home. The place was packed and buzzing: a good sign. There, the ocakbaşi master at his grill, concentrating intently whilst tending skewers of lamb sis and adana threaded on flat blades; a metal dome for cooking the flatbreads; over there, the oven for cooking Pide and Lahmacun.

Laminated menus were dispensed but my dining chums deferred to me for the ordering. A quick scan and I located the special mixed kebab, pleasingly appended “with quail".

To begin with some starters to keep us distracted while our meats were grilled. A cold salad, Patlican Soslu, chunky and oily (in a good way) and a plate of alarmingly coloured tarama with two sorts of their hot bread and lashings of the Buzbag (believe me Turkish wine while not the best goes perfectly with this sort of food).

Eventually, the main event arrived, a large platter, piled high with meats interspersed with peppers and a large plate of salad. We ate Dos Hermanos style which meant that each person in turn got to nominate a piece of meat and the others have to follow suit. This ensures a fair distribution of said meats but still allowing for the element of surprise wherein a chosen piece might be quite small. This usually leads to much joshing and merriment amongst those who have chosen larger bits. All great fun.

In the taste stakes vying for first place were the Adana - perfect texture with spicing just so - and the freshly grilled quail halves which were hot, sticky and salty. I could have done with a little more of the other lamb components but ribs and chops were done well with crisp fat and properly seasoned. Kidneys were a little over pink but fresh tasting and not at all rubbery.

Cop Sis was good too although it's always at the bottom of the pile and by the time you get to it you're usually stuffed. Too full as well to try the base layer of bread which had soaked up all the meaty juices although it didn't go to waste as they kindly bagged that and the little of the meat that was left.

Grilled Peppers had a good char giving them a beautifully smoky taste followed by a surprisingly big heat kick. Salad was a bit style over substance, majored in cucumber and remained mostly untouched: not a patch on the composed salads at AM although I’m always pleased to see a little sprinkling of sumac.

We finished with three good medium Turkish coffees, some lokum and a bill that we vastly overestimated. Most of the difference went into the tip that was well deserved as the service had been so friendly, willing and attentive.

So there we have it – what started out as tentative foray into regions unknown ended up as a classic DH night out of old: a few pints of mild and a trip to a Mangal which if not perfect got all the important things right. Not quite up there with our best ever but bloody close. That’ll do for me.

YILDIZ: BALLSED UP MIXED GRILL ON THE BLACKSTOCK ROAD

It had been too damn long since DH last sat across each from other staring down a plate of freshly grilled lamb and its innards. So, when HP suggested that we tail our various separate Saturday activities with a visit to one of North London’s Anatolian restaurants, I did not take much persuading.

When we met, I was already almost full to bursting after a splendid afternoon being introduced to the delights of a Jewish Shabbat meal by my new chum, Anthony Silverman and his lovely wife, Rachel. It’s not light stuff, but entirely delicious and I ate so much more than my fair share of the chopped liver with fried onions, Chollent stew and Kasha Varnishkas that, by the time I waddled out of the tube at Finsbury Park, I was convinced that I would do little more than nibble around the edges of anything we ordered that evening.

The stomach, however, is a clever, resilient and wonderful thing, and with a decent pint of London Pride in The Faltering Fullback and a quick walk down The Blackstock Road, to move things about a bit, the first sniff of grilled meats made me hungry all over again.

Yildiz is an unassuming little joint that ticks all the pre-requisite DH buttons; the grill at the front manned by a fat man paying attention to the meat, only to the meat as it pops and zizzles on skewers above hot coals. Next to him, a chiller cabinet containing more skewers of meat and trays of offal for the more adventurous and, at the back, a few tables in the dimly lit dining room.

The menu too pushed all the right buttons with the usual suspects in the line up of hot and cold starters and a promising looking selection of kebabs including their mixed grill for £13.50. It was not long before we had ordered our standard selection of a mixed grill with a side order of lamb ribs and a plate of testicles.

Starters, although obviously just there to buy time while the Ocakbasi-meister does what he do so well were not bad at all and the Ispanak and Patlican came served with bread hot from the grill and wiped across grilled meats to give it a glisten before serving. So far, so very good particularly when served with a bottle of that rather pungent Turkish wine, Villa Doluca, which has magical properties managing to tastes perfect in context, in the restaurant when eaten with a mixed grill, but then turning to piss the moment should you be silly enough to try in the cold light of day.

More’s the shame then that the main event was such a let down. It was not just that our server misunderstood and only brought us one mixed grill to share, resulting in a fierce fight and much acrimony as we tried to divide each item up equally with bitter cries of “you’ve got more fat” and “that’s my testicle” but also because, quite frankly the standard of grilling was not that good.

The plate lacked the wow factor of the very best, the Angel Mangal, of course (sigh!) and more recently Anatolia in Hackney. Lamb ribs were hot and crisp, but the offal tasted, well, awful and liver that tastes liverish is seldom a good sign. Little nuggets of organ meat, usually so prized by DH were left behind as we disconsolately poked at the plate to find bits worth eating, before we pushed ourselves back from the table with a sad sigh.

It was not cheap either, perhaps because HP, in his cups already, moved from Villa Doluca to an unnecessary bottle of Yakut, most of which remained untouched and also added a coffee at the end bringing the bill to a whopping £68 + tip, a lot to pay for iffy offal and dodgy grilling and enough to make me sorry I had strayed so far from more of that superb chopped liver.

ANATOLIA: COME TO ME MY LOVE AT LAST I'VE FOUND YOU

Well, it’s been two long years, but finally DH have found somewhere to at least partly fill the void left by the demise of our favourite Ockabasi de choix, the blessed Angel Mangal.

In that two years we have subject ourselves to plates of charred meat, limp salads and more desiccated testicles than you would find in the archives of The Science Museum. It is fair to say that we were beginning to despair of ever finding anywhere to come close to the superlative platters of flesh offered up by our old chum, Mustapha.

After returning to London from leafy Rotherham in the early morning, unpacking, repacking for L.A and hitting the gym for a much needed workout, I was not in the mood for leftovers and certainly not in the mood to cook.

So, with HP, who needed little persuading, in tow, we headed out to Hackney, Mare St to be more precise and a small place that had been on our list for some time, Anatolia.

But first, of course, a pre-supper pint or two, in this case served up with considerable charm at The Pembury Tavern, a cavernous pub on Amhurst St that serves some of the very best real ale in London and definitely the best pork scratchings. What the pub lacks in ambience, it makes up for in the quality of its beer and two assorted pints each from Milton Brewery in Cambridgeshire, fortified us against the cold night air and for the short walk back to Anatolia.

It’s pleasingly canteen like and the grill was in full flame with someone else’s supper as we took a table and looked at the short menu. There is never much to be discussed for DH when it comes to Turkish grilling and, alongside a few starters, our mixed grill with a side order of quail was soon sizzling away atop the hot coals.

Starters were sizable and better than most with Ispanak, Tarama and Patlican, scooped up with warm flat bread, distracting us until our equally sizable platter of grilled goodies was placed before us with a side plate of salad and bowls of garlic and chilli sauce.

The grilling was spot on, with the juices still bubbling happily on our first bites of lamb chop and, like all good purveyors of grilled meats, they were not backward with the salt without which all the flavour stays locked inside its fleshy prison. Adana were suitably spicy and the lamb ribs benefited from a long strip of fat to keep the meat moist.

It wasn’t quite Angel Mangal, the addition of dry slices from the revolving doner in the take-away section added little and the single sweetbread and lambs testicle, while very tasty indeed, merely left us both wishing we had placed an order for a side dish of them. But, these are minor complaints for one of the best flesh fests you will find without googling “collegeamateurs.com” and at £40 including service and a charge of £3.50 for corkage on a bottle of Spanish something or other, very good value indeed.

We still haven’t forgotten Mustapha, but we’ll definitely be going back to Anatolia and very probably to The Pembury Tavern beforehand.

Maedah Grill

Throw back the little ones
And pan-fry the big ones

Ever since the loss of our (that’s how we like to think of it) beloved Angel Mangal Dos Hermanos have been scouring London for a decent Ocakbasi Restaurant. We’ve tried the rest and unfortunately they’ve not been the best. Compared to the magnificent Angel Mangal Special Mixed Grill (with quail) restaurants which have come highly recommended have failed to please. Oh yes, they’ve been pretty cheap but as we know cheap food is just that – cheap.

The latest in a long line of pretenders is the Maedah Grill which is located just before the justly famous Tayyabs. Could it be the real thing ? Not a chance. Just another in a long line of dispiriting meals I’ve had recently.

Nothing , apart from some very greasy Muska Boregi had been cooked to order. Lahmacun came from a job lot of the stuff that been sitting around too long it was tough and tasteless. No sooner had I finished the starters than my main course arrived suspiciously soon. I’m not sure what the chap at the grill was employed for as he hardly seemed to do any grilling in my short time there. The mixed grill was, unfortunately, not much better than the starters . Some lamb chops and chicken shish were ok but an Adana kebab was overcooked and the Shawarma was a pile of desiccated scraps. Not nice.

The salad component was risible. At AM one would get a large composed salad of fresh shredded vegetables, flat leaf parsley, radishes and grilled peppers all sprinkled with sumac. Simple, fresh and delicious. Here as at so many other Turkish joints it was a sad-looking melange of tomatoes, onions, cucumber and lettuce. They couldn’t even grill the tomatoes properly. A drink to console myself was out of the question as there’s a no alcohol policy.

In the past I may have stuck it out until the end and had a coffee and a dessert but these days I’m more inclined to cut my losses and ask for the bill. Which is exactly what I did. And only thirty-odd minutes after coming in. The night wasn’t a complete loss though. On my way back I ducked into StJB&W where a lovely Damson and Crème Fraiche ice cream put things in a much better light. Ice Cream. Is there nothing it can’t do ?