In a new series, Place at the Table, we look at diasporic enclaves around the world through their cuisines—and the people who, in trying to recreate a taste of home, have forged exciting food scenes that invite others in.
Take a walk along Green Lanes, a seemingly nondescript stretch of main road that slices through northeast London, and the scent of smoky charcoal soon becomes intoxicating. It unfurls from within the many ocakbaşıs (grill houses) and kebab shops that occupy the street’s small, brightly lit store fronts, where hulks of meat spin majestically on skewers and freshly-made pide is methodically slid in and out of ovens. This strip may look like a disorderly milieu of takeout spots best intended to serve late night drinkers. But any Londoner well versed in their city’s cultural fabric knows that the burning of the mangal grills here is a piece of living, edible, history—and one linked to decades of Turkish and Kurdish migration to the capital.
I first experienced this side of London at age 13, on New Year’s Eve—an evening marked by the rich flavors of a lamb kebab my parents ordered and a rambunctious waiter who drank so much that he attempted to lift a table up with his teeth. We still talk about that waiter to this day, but otherwise nothing felt remarkable about being another Turkish-British family in London, bidding farewell to one year and optimistically raising our glasses to the next. My father is originally from Adana in the south, and like many children of a diaspora, it’s taken me a long time to develop a curiosity about the side of myself I didn’t feel rooted in. On recent visits to Istanbul, I’ve begun connecting the city’s modern identity with that of my own, but time and distance from London have allowed me to see that cultural touchstones were never far from home. The Turkish community in London extends far beyond Green Lanes, too, down into Dalston—and now, a breadth of new flavors have emerged, thanks to a proliferation of contemporary Turkish restaurants in recent years.
Ferhat Dirik, who runs Mangal II in Dalston, is another second-generation immigrant who has only recently begun forging a path to understand his own heritage—although his journey has been more pre-determined than mine. The son of Ali Dirik, a chef who moved from Anatolia in the 1980s and opened Mangal Ocakbaşı (named after the traditional charcoal cooking method) followed by Mangal II in 1994, Ferhat took over the operations of the latter in 2021 and began to enmesh himself with Turkish cuisine in a deeper way. “For years I had traveled everywhere but Turkey,” he says. “Maybe it was an age thing, maybe it was an identity thing. Then, of course, I learned that Istanbul is the best city in the world, and there are many Turks there who share the same values and ideals as Londoners. The more I realized that, the more connected I felt.”
In a storyline that could have been ripped straight from The Bear, he and his chef brother, Sertaç, took on the challenge of reinventing a family-run restaurant cherished by locals for its consistency (artists Gilbert & George famously had dinner there every night, only switching to the original, now named Mangal 1, after the brothers “installed a music system”) and set out to create a more refined menu that reflected the new era of Turkish cuisine they were witnessing on their travels to Istanbul and other parts of the country. The menu still retains plenty of familiarity (pickles and smoked hummus in a pool of olive oil; red pepper dolma and yogurt) but tradition is now served with a pinch of innovation: cured mackerel, caught in British waters, is doused with peppery Anatolian flavors; mutton koftë sits atop grilled apple; cornish chicken is stuffed with garlic and Aleppo-spiced sausage.
“I think the Turkish population is increasingly open to displaying aspects of our cuisine that go beyond [kebabs]—which is a great thing when done right—because there is a lot more to Turkish culture,” says Ferhat. After decades of Turkish restaurants not being granted the same weight as other more Euro-centric counterparts—often considered more of a cheap eat than an elevated dining experience—Ferhat says, there is less of a need to prove their worth. Perhaps, in part, because the British palate has become more open-minded. “It’s an exciting moment for Turkish cuisine because the perception is changing,” he says. “We no longer have to sell ourselves short by charging less to be hospitable and accommodating, which is part of our culture and our dignity, but also expected of us. You don’t see Spanish restaurants offering free bread or free wine. We have to remain confident in our cuisine.”