Turkey

Istanbul

Sarıyer

Sheep's head and trotters, simmered for hours until the meat slips from the bone and served with garlic vinegar, a spoon of melted butter with red pepper and lemon: kelle paça çorbası is the soup Türkiye eats while the rest of the country is asleep. Kelle is the head, paça the feet, and most shops sell either or both: a kelle bowl is meatier, with cheek, tongue and sometimes brain; a paça bowl is all gelatine and tendon. It is the food of the late night and the early morning, sold in çorbacı soup houses that open before dawn and sit next to the bus station in most Anatolian towns, and it is the traditional cure for a hangover and the standard breakfast of people who have worked all night. Its relative in the Balkans is pača and in the Caucasus khash.

The heads are singed to remove the wool, split, soaked and scrubbed, and the trotters scraped clean; a shop that skips this stage will have a soup that smells of the farmyard. They go into a large pot with water, onion, bay and salt and simmer for four to six hours, skimmed often, until the broth is cloudy and sticky with collagen. The meat is picked off the bone, chopped and returned to the pot, and the bones discarded. Two finishing styles exist. The plain southern style serves the broth as it is, white and clear. The terbiyeli style thickens it with a roux of flour and butter whisked with egg yolk and lemon, which turns it pale yellow and gives it body. At the table everyone adjusts for themselves: a ladle of sarımsaklı sirke, crushed garlic steeped in vinegar; a drizzle of butter with pul biber; lemon, salt and dried mint.

A good kelle paça has a broth that coats the lips and sets to a jelly if left to cool, with a clean, meaty smell and no trace of mustiness. Mark down a thin broth that tastes of stock cube, meat that has been boiled to strings or left in chewy lumps, and any gaminess that the garlic has to cover rather than complement. The meat should be generous enough that a spoon finds something in every scoop; many shops charge by the bowl and ration accordingly. The condiments should arrive separately so the bowl is not pre-soured. Bread should be fresh and plentiful, because it is the only side. A terbiyeli version that has curdled or thickened into a paste is a technical failure, not a stylistic choice.

Kelle paça çorbası

Türkiye

Hebun çorba evi

Hebun çorba genel olarak çeşitleriyle güzel olsa da en önemli çorbası kelle paçayı şiddetle tavsiye ederim ,parasına istinaden hakkını sonuna kadar veriyor ,gerek porsiyonu olsun gerekse lezzeti olsun çok iyi,hastaysanız da acısını ve sarmısağını fazla atmanız hastalıkları rahatlıkla def edecektir.

Hand-chopped lamb and tail fat, seasoned with little more than salt and red pepper, pressed along a long flat skewer, grilled over charcoal and served on flatbread with grilled peppers, tomato, onion with sumac and parsley: Adana kebap carries the name of its city for a reason. It comes from Adana in southern Türkiye, where the name has been a registered geographical indication since 2005, with rules on the meat (lamb from animals under a year old, shoulder, leg and brisket), the fat (tail fat, about one part to four or five of meat) and the knife (a zırh, the wide curved blade, not a mincer). Its relatives are easy to confuse: Urfa kebap is the same construction without the heat, and a beyti is a kebab rolled in lavash with yoghurt and tomato sauce. A true Adana is spicy, coarse-textured and tastes first of lamb and charcoal.

The meat is chopped by hand until it is a rough paste with visible pieces of fat, then kneaded with salt and flakes of dried red pepper from the region, sometimes a spoon of red pepper paste for colour; onion and garlic are not in the registered recipe. The mixture rests cold so the fat firms up, then is pressed by hand along a flat skewer two or three fingers wide, pinched into ridges so it grips, and laid directly over a bed of oak or fruitwood charcoal with no grate between. The cook turns it often and presses the bread onto the meat as it grills to catch the dripping fat. Four to six minutes is enough. Ground meat from a machine will not stay on the skewer unless egg or bread is added, which is why minced versions taste of filler.

Score the texture first: the cut face should show distinct bits of meat and fat, not a smooth sausage grain, and the skewer should hold together without binders. The outside wants to be lightly charred at the ridges, the inside juicy and faintly pink. Dryness means too little fat or an overcooked skewer; a grey, bouncy interior means minced meat. The heat should build on the second bite, not scorch on the first. Expect fat-soaked lavash underneath, long grilled green peppers, a tomato half and sliced onion with sumac; a glass of şalgam or ayran is the usual drink. Mark down a kebab served on a plate without bread, beef passed off as lamb, and any Adana that arrives mild, which is an Urfa with the wrong name.

Adana kebap

Kaburgacı Cabbar Istanbul

The label is Adana Kebap, plus we ate Rib Kebap ( kaburga şiş, both are delicious, the meat melts in your mouth 😋 
The rest also has Yaglıkara, but it was finished :( 

Kahvaltı is the Turkish breakfast, and in a restaurant it means a table covered edge to edge in small plates: white cheese and aged kaşar, olives green and black, tomato and cucumber, honey with a slab of kaymak, jams, butter, sucuk fried with eggs or a pan of menemen, simit or fresh bread, and tea poured without pause from a double kettle. The word means before coffee, which places it as the meal that precedes the first cup of the day. It is eaten at home every morning in a smaller form, but the serpme kahvaltı, the spread, is a weekend institution, a two-hour sitting in a café in Van, on the Bosphorus or in any town with a view. Van, in the east, claims the national title and has a street of breakfast houses to defend it. The dish is the whole table, so it is judged as a whole.

A kitchen that takes it seriously builds the table from sources rather than from a wholesaler. Cheese is the first test: a brined white beyaz peynir with real salt and tang, a hard yellow kaşar with some age, and ideally a regional third such as the herbed otlu peynir of Van or a string cheese. Olives should be cured, not canned, and dressed with oil and thyme or chilli. Kaymak, the clotted cream of water buffalo or cow milk, is spooned next to honey still in the comb or at least unheated. The hot plates are made to order: sucuklu yumurta, slices of sucuk fried until the fat runs and eggs cracked into it; menemen; sigara böreği, fried cheese pastries; sometimes kavurma or a gözleme. Bread arrives warm and keeps arriving. Tea is black, brewed strong in the top of a çaydanlık and diluted to taste, served in tulip glasses that should never sit empty.

Score the table on its parts and its generosity. Mark up cheeses with character, honey and kaymak that are the real thing, eggs that arrive hot in the pan, bread that is fresh, tomatoes that taste of tomato, and tea that keeps coming without being asked. Mark down supermarket cheese cut into identical cubes, olives from a tin, jam in portion packs, margarine standing in for butter, cold or pre-fried eggs, a single basket of bread rationed to the table, and tea served in a pot that goes cold. Count the plates but weigh the quality: twenty mediocre dishes lose to twelve good ones. A kahvaltı that ends early because the table ran out of bread or tea has failed its basic purpose, which is to keep you there until lunch.

Kahvaltı

Nezih Kebap Yuvalama

It was geat and delicious for whole table of breakfast. Every piece was fresh and over the average! And Bosphoros view was spectacular.

Rank	Place	Top dish	Reviews	Score
1	Hebun çorba evi Huzur, Kemal Atatürk Cd 5/A, 34475 Şişli/İstanbul, Türkiye Top dish: Kelle Paça Soup	Kelle Paça Soup	1	8.691 review
2	Nezih Kebap Yuvalama Rumeli Hisarı, Yahya Kemal Cd. No:24, 34470 Sarıyer/İstanbul, Türkiye Top dish: Kahvaltı	Kahvaltı	1	8.211 review
3	Kaburgacı Cabbar Istanbul Maslak, 33. Sk, 34398 Şişli/İstanbul, Türkiye Top dish: Adana kebap	Adana kebap	1	81 review

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Kelle Paça Soup

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