I want to tell you a story that happened to me and some teacher friends of mine a few weeks ago.
It was a Saturday and we were on our break between morning and afternoon classes. Mark, Turgay and I decided to go get some lunch. Tired of the usual places (there are only about 3 decent places to eat in Şirinevler), I asked where we could go to eat.
“A student of mine told me about a good restaurant down this street, but I forget the name of it,” Turgay said.
So we set out in search of this restaurant. We didn’t know the name, but we passed a place called “Sebat” with a big white and orange sign.
“This place looks decent,” I said, and we all agreed to go inside. It was a döner restaurant, and the inside was clean, newly refurbished, and the waitstaff were well-dressed and hurrying around serving the customers. I saw a price list, but because it was posted so high above the register, it was rendered illegible. There was a tall, plump girl behind the register with too much lipstick on – “Hoş geldiniz!”
We took a seat at a table and a waiter took our order.
“What is there?” I asked.
“Döner kebab,” the waiter replied, motioning to the huge piece of meat roasting on the vertical spit in the corner. That was about it. We ordered döner kebab and some soup. The waiter brought out some tomatoes and cucumbers (Turkish “salad”) and a plate of yogurt. The soup came.
“How is it?” Mark asked.
“It’s not great. The soup at Andok is better,” I said. We finished our soup, pecking at the yogurt with bread, and then the döner came.
Let me go on a gristle-dripping tangent here. The döner kebab is the most common street food in Turkey. It is cheap and a great on-the-go snack. It consists of thinly sliced chicken or lamb meat which has been roasted on a vertical spit and is then placed on bread with some lettuce, tomato pieces, and, if you want, salty hot pepper flakes. The standard is between half a small loaf of terrible, cheap white bread (ekmek döner), but of course there are variations on this: there is the pide döner, on pita bread; the lavaş döner, which is rolled in a thin, tortilla-like bread much like a burrito; and of course the pilav üstü döner, which is just the meat on top of rice. The most common döner kebab is the ekmek döner, which can be found for as cheap as 1.25 TL (around 75 cents), but is never more than 5 liras. The döner is not exceptionally delicious, but it is nonetheless a staple of the Turks’ diet, and they will almost always cite it as their favorite food should you ask them. On the same note, it is invariably the most common business venture in Turkey, as you can find, minimum, at least 2 or 3 döner shops on every block.
Inexpensive and easy as it may be, I do not, however, recommend the Turkish döner. It is usually made with cheap meat which sits on the spit all day exposed to the elements and savory germs of passersby, and white bread which has been manhandled by more people than you want to know, hence the cheap prices (I was sick for a week after consuming the chicken variety last year). To add to the disappointment, the döner is not even a Turkish invention – it comes from Germany, where it was conceived by Turkish-German gästarbeitern in the 1960’s and later imported to Turkey. Check it out. Without one bit of doubt, the döners in Germany are not only unimaginably better than their bastard Turkish cousins, but one of the best foods I have ever eaten due to the higher quality of ingredients and the addition of a variety of scrumptious yogurt sauces (none of that here). You could imagine my disappointment upon arrival here to discover that even the döners in New York were much heartier than the measly, tasteless cardboard that is the standard here.
That being said, a döner is a döner in Turkey, nothing more; you won’t find a spectacular one, and if it’s more than 5 liras, it’s a ripoff.
Now, where was I? Oh yes, the döner had just come. We began to eat our döner, which was over lavaş, the thin bread I mentioned.
“How is it?” Turgay asked.
“Bland,” I said. It tasted completely… well, tasteless. Should have gone to Andok, I thought.
As we were eating, Turgay noticed some photos on the wall of some people eating in the restaurant.
“I know this man from the television. He’s quite famous,” he said. I looked at the other photos. He was right. Even I recognized some of the faces from Turkish television – one man, the host from “Turkey’s Got Talent” (a wildly popular primetime variety show), was in a picture sitting at the table behind ours with the restaurant’s owner, smiling happily. This place’s döner sucks, I thought - it can’t be that popular.
“Who would have thought those famous people would come here to eat, in Şirinevler,” Mark said.
We finished our insipid lunch and stood to pay. When we asked for the bill, the waiter indiscreetly wrote a number on a piece of paper and handed it to us on a plate. When we got to the register, they read our “bill” total – “61 liras ($45).”
A look of shock passed over our face. “What!? How?” Mark began to argue with them.
It should be noted here that both Mark and Turgay are Turkish – Mark is Turkish by birth, but purely American, and Turgay had spent a good amount of time in Canada teaching English. Even though we all ordered in Turkish, we spoke English during the duration of our lunch, and now it hit me why the bill was so high.
“Well, you had soup, 4 liras each, and yogurt and salad, which was also 4 liras,” the ignorant waiter replied. Asshole. 12 liras for a plate of shitty vegetables.
“But we didn’t order that, you just put it on the table,” Mark said. A sleazy trick commonly used on unsuspecting tourists.
“But you ate it.”
“Then how much is the döner?” Mark asked.
“12.50,” the waiter replied.
“What a fucking ripoff,” I muttered to Turgay. “That döner wasn’t even decent.”
We didn’t feel like arguing, so we each paid twenty liras (for one of the worst lunches I’ve ever had), and grumblingly left. We shorted them 1 lira.
“I don’t understand that, why it was so expensive, and why we had to pay for the salad and the mezzes. Even at Andok they are free!” Mark said when we left.
“Yeah, and that döner was shitty. For 12.50, that döner better ************ me,” I said.
Turgay smiled. “I guess we’re just not rich and famous enough to eat at Sebat,” he joked. We all laughed and walked back to English Time.
Well, at least the yogurt was good.
