Name: Atilla Turkish Cuisine
Address: Bos en Lommerweg 363, Amsterdam, 1061 DH, NL
Telephone: 06 14807956
Rating: 4.2

Netherlands

Amsterdam

West

Atilla Turkish Cuisine

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 Soup

Türkiye

Meat stacked on a vertical spit, roasted in front of a grill as it turns and shaved off in thin slices as the outer layer browns: that is döner kebab, and the word döner means turning. The upright spit is generally credited to Bursa in the 1860s or 1870s, and the Turkish original is made from whole slices of lamb or beef layered with tail fat, not from mince. From there the dish split into families: the Bursa plate with butter and tomato sauce known as İskender, the Istanbul ekmek arası döner in half a loaf with onion and tomato, the Greek gyros with pork and tzatziki, the Levantine shawarma with its garlic toum, and the German döner built in Berlin in the 1970s, a flatbread pocket stuffed with salad and sauces that has since become the most eaten version in Europe. On BiteCritic you rate the one in front of you, so it helps to know which family it belongs to.

A proper spit starts the day before. Slices of leg and shoulder are beaten thin, marinated in onion juice, yoghurt or milk, salt and black pepper, then threaded onto the skewer in alternating layers of lean and fat and pressed into a tapered cylinder. In front of the heat, the surface should brown within the first centimetre while the core stays underdone, and the usta cuts only what has coloured, in long ribbons that fall onto a tray. The spit is turned away from the heat between cuts so the next layer does not scorch. Beef, chicken and mixed spits follow the same logic; the difference is in the marinade and the fat. Industrial döner is minced meat, breadcrumbs and binders pressed into a frozen cone, and it slices as crumbly, uniform brown shreds rather than ribbons.

Judge the meat before the bread or the sauce. Ribbons with a crisp browned edge and a soft, juicy inside score highly; grey strips held warm in a tray since noon do not. The fat should be present enough to carry flavour and not so present that the bread turns translucent. In a sandwich, the bread matters second: pide or half a loaf should be lightly toasted on the grill and able to hold the filling without tearing. Salad belongs in moderation and sauces should not be the loudest thing on the plate; in Türkiye garlic yoghurt sauces are a German import. Mark down pressed-cone meat, meat cut thick and chewy, soggy bread, and lettuce-heavy wraps where the kebab is a garnish. A spit that has been fully carved and restarted midday is a sign of a busy shop, and a good one.

Döner kebab

Kelle paça çorbası

Tadı rahiyası tuzu çok iyiydi. Etleri boldu ve güzel pişmişti ağızda dağılıyordu. Diğer çorbalara göre favorim bu.

There is always a discussion between our friends where to eat doner kebap in Amsterdam?

I regularly eat in here and like it. Unfortunately it wasn’t the case for me this afternoon. Still a nice taste like in my hometown Ankara. This time the meat was cooked a lot and i felt it dry.

I tried the plate version and dürüm version. Still a nice food but i realised every time i come here before 4pm the meat is usually dry.

If you are planning to go here, go there after 4pm which you will have freshly cut meat.

Atilla Turkish Cuisine

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