Name: Cafe Baskent
Address: Putselaan 242-244, Rotterdam, 3073 JP, NL
Telephone: 010 485 6126
Price range: €
Rating: 4.3

Netherlands

Rotterdam

Cafe Baskent

Cağ kebabı is the horizontal döner of Erzurum in eastern Turkey: lamb layered with its own fat on a long spit, turned on its side in front of a wood fire, and carved not in shavings but in thick slices that are threaded onto small skewers, the cağ, and handed to the table one skewer at a time. It is older than the upright döner and most Turkish food historians treat it as the form from which the vertical version was adapted in the nineteenth century. In Erzurum, and in the town of Oltu which claims it just as firmly, the kebab is a lunch dish eaten in restaurants that cook nothing else, with the master standing at the fire all day; the dish has had a protected geographical indication since 2009, and the register fixes the meat as lamb, the marinade as onion, salt and black pepper, and the fire as oak or beech wood.

The meat is boned lamb from the leg and shoulder, cut into wide thin sheets, salted and layered overnight with sliced onion and pepper so the onion juice softens it; no yoghurt, no tomato paste, no spice beyond pepper. In the morning the sheets are stacked on the horizontal spit with slabs of tail fat between them and pressed into a tight cylinder, and the spit is set beside, not above, a bed of burning wood so the meat cooks by radiant heat and the dripping fat does not fall into the fire. As the outer layer browns, the usta slices it off in a long knife stroke and the hot pieces go straight onto a cağ skewer, four or five pieces each, fat and lean together. Only the browned outer layer is ever carved; the inside keeps cooking for the next round.

Judge it by the skewer in front of you. The pieces should be dark and crisp at the edges, pink and juicy within, with rendered fat visible but not pooling, and they should taste of lamb, wood smoke and onion in that order. It is eaten by pulling the meat off the cağ with a piece of thin lavaş, with raw onion, tomato and sometimes a spoon of yoghurt alongside; sauces are not part of it. Mark down meat that is grey throughout, slices that are dry because the spit sat too far from the fire, a kebab cooked over gas or charcoal, beef sold as cağ, and pieces served on a plate rather than on the skewer, which usually means they were carved earlier and kept warm. The ratio of fat to lean should be visible on every skewer and about one to four.

Cağ kebabı

Australia

Chicken and corn soup in Australia means two different bowls that share a name. The one on the menu of nearly every suburban Chinese restaurant is a Cantonese-derived egg-drop soup: chicken stock thickened with cornflour to a glossy, spoon-coating body, creamed sweetcorn stirred through it, shredded poached chicken, and beaten egg trailed in at the end so it sets in soft ribbons, finished with white pepper and a few drops of sesame oil. The other is the home and café version, a chunkier chowder of chicken, corn kernels and potato in a stock and milk base, often thickened with a little flour, which is what pubs and bakeries ladle out in winter. Both are among the most ordered soups in the country, the Chinese-restaurant kind is the default entrée on a banquet menu, and the tinned supermarket version is the sick-day soup of a generation of Australian children.

The restaurant soup starts with a clear chicken stock, ideally made from the carcass of the bird whose meat goes into the bowl. A tin of creamed corn goes into the simmering stock with a handful of extra kernels for texture; the stock is seasoned with salt, a little sugar and white pepper and sometimes a splash of Shaoxing wine, then thickened with a slurry of cornflour and water poured in while stirring until it holds a light coating on the spoon. Shredded chicken, poached separately so the stock stays clear, goes in to heat through. The egg is the last step and the one that separates kitchens: one or two eggs beaten and drizzled in a thin stream across the barely simmering surface with the heat off, left for ten seconds, then stirred once so they form soft threads rather than clumps or clouds. Spring onion and sesame oil go on at the table.

A good bowl is pale gold, lightly thick without being gluey, and shows distinct components: ribbons of egg, visible shreds of chicken, corn you can taste as corn, with the stock itself tasting of chicken and pepper. The texture should be smooth enough to drink and thick enough to coat, and it should be very hot. Mark down a soup that is thick as paste from too much cornflour, one that is thin and watery, egg that has scrambled into hard lumps or dissolved to a cloudy haze because the stock was boiling, chicken in dry cubes or an obviously processed shred, a soup that tastes mainly of sugar from the creamed corn, and a bowl made with a stock cube rather than stock, which shows as a flat, salty background with no body. The chowder version is judged separately on its potato and its cream; neither should be confused with the other.

Chicken and Corn Soup

Every time i go to Rotterdam i always visit here to eat Cag kebab. The taste is really close to what we have in Turkiye.

Nice quality meat and it is all smooth. I always eat less cooked version which we call “tatari”. In one portion you will get 4 pieces but i ask it get one by one to eat it hot.

It comes with onion and tomatoes. I don’t eat the tomatoes but onion is a must.

I wish i live here to only eat this food 😂


Really nice taste. Good ratio of chicken pieces and noodles. It was hot. I ordered the half size. Nice way to start eating.

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