Finding Amsterdam's Kingsland Road.

It's in Oost that I feel most in London. Recent visits have me missing home...

I’m told that sunlight does many things for me, like boost my serotonin levels and influence my immune system. I’d like to add one more happy outcome: sunlight activates a hormone inside me that makes me want to eat Turkish food. The urge is biological and uncontrollable.

I’m not joking: as soon as we’re in wall-to-wall sunshine, I want to rid my kitchen of anything remotely wintery (bye carrots, laters potatoes!) and go heavy on Turkish food. I want meze pastes that I can scoop up with simit, I want dolma that split with one bite. I want kebabs smokier than volcanos and huge tomatoes chambered like hearts. In my fantasy, I eat all of this in the shade, by wide-open doors, feeling street heat roar across my ankles.

I’ll admit, there’s another reason Turkish food has been on my mind lately. My supper club, FEEST, is in exactly two weeks. This is the part where things get exciting: I’m working with Esra, a Turkish chef, to serve up a feast, and my tough jobs include sampling her crispy, spinachy börek and discussing whether the lamb should sit this way or that. Next on my to-do list: eating mantı, which are Turkish dumplings painted with the sunset colours of yoghurt bled into chilli butter. I also have to pair the menu with some fruity, hot-climate wines (I’ll spit).

Turkish cuisine is, to me, a cuisine for people who love real food. By real I mean wholesome, colourful, unbothered by whatever fad is going around TikTok; it’s simple but it’s also not, it’s ingredients that are absolutely themselves cooked with technical precision. Or perhaps it’s none of those things, but a multi-faceted food culture that’s energetic and evolving. This supper club has me learning more and more, and I want to delve deeper.

The börek served at FEEST.

Turkish food is also real to me because it’s accompanied by spectacular hospitality. The food is there to fill you up. In these times, we all need a bit of filling up. When I eat in places like Belly Pepper, or Esra, or Istanbul Gözleme on Ten Katemarket, the staff’s friendliness is the antithesis of Amsterdam’s usual service, which loves making you sit for three hours while absolutely no ones offers you tap water.

I’ve not been to Turkey much, only once to Kalkan, an old fishing village that’s now popular with tourists. But even the kebabs I had there were life-changing: they came in long cardboard boxes with tear off lids. Omg. A few days after trying them, my husband proposed. Perhaps kebabs are a secret aphrodisiac? Or perhaps it was the sight of me spilling lettuce down my T-shirt that made my husband think, yep, he’s the one. Anyway, what I’m saying is my knowledge of Turkish food is not expansive. It stems from working for many years in Dalston in London, where every other business on Kingsland Road is a smouldering kebab shop. Now that it’s sunny, I find my thoughts drifting back there.

Kingsland Road (by Tarquin Binary).

Kingsland Road is everything I miss about London. It’s a fat strip of hot tarmac that shoots up like a geyser from central London, reaching high north before fountaining, eventually, into ladders of terrace houses. Technically, it becomes Kingsland High Street halfway up, but none of Dalston’s residents – grannies bent double, blue-haired baristas, two wildly different groups that both use shopping trolley bags – would call it that. It’s a brash road, never shy of a shouting match. Three hissing red busses are in view at all time. Polish shops repeat themselves like a chorus in a folk song. There are artisan bagel bakeries and clapped out cinemas. Kebab shops – plenty of them – perfume the air. There are chains too, McDonalds and Costa, but they don’t seem offensive. Nothing about the road is offensive, even though it may feel that way at first. It’s the family member who calls you twat and storms out the room only to come back in two minutes later asking if you’re ready to go out for a pint.

I’ll duck as I say this: Amsterdam lacks this kind of energy. Whenever I visit home, I routinely get asked what I think of my new home city. I’ve answered so many times now the words feel scripted: Amsterdam is as beautiful as Paris and Rome but quizzically it never gets mentioned in the same breath; its pace of life is seductive; everything works like clockwork; it’s uniquely aquatic, like a water city in a computer game; in the sun it’s unbeatable, becoming diamond-bright; it does coffee better than anywhere; its bakery scene is outrageously good. But: it lacks grit; there’s no graffiti, no corner shops, no sense of absurd; I’ve never felt on edge here – a good thing, of course – but it also lacks any kind of edge; it’s very ordered, very genteel, you begin to wonder who is doing this manicuring and what is being clipped away.

Javastraat.

Only Javastraat reminds me home. It’s Amsterdam’s Kingsland Road. For one, it’s pleasingly less white. For two, it has energy, in the form of people, who move along the pavement at different speeds, some ambling, some marching, some standing and smoking (it might be a strange thing to notice but it’s true: head to another of Amsterdam’s busy streets, like Leidsestraat, and you’ll notice the speed of its flow is constant, uniform). That stickiness, that sense of community, of life actually being lived on the kerb, gives it a realness. You might disagree, but reality is relative, and mine is found on Javastraat, dodging shopping trolley bags.

There are smouldering kebab shops too, which this wall-to-wall sunshine has me visiting. My favourite is Ocakbaşı Koksmuts Cinar, which came recommended to me by two Turkish chefs and food critic Mara Grimm. When the waiter asked me why I was there, if I was on holiday, I said I was there because the restaurant came so highly recommended. It had? he asked. Your write up, in Het Parool? Ah yes, I think I heard about that, he said, nonplussed. Good places care little for what’s said about them. They just want to make good food.

Ocakbaşı Koksmuts Cinar.

Fat dripped on coals to a near-perfect beat, a metronomic tss, tss, tss. Above the fire were extractor fans the size of Star Destroyers. Behind them, boxes of luminous vegetables. I ordered an adana kebab, which is lamb mince mixed with tail fat and shaped into an unsightly log. It tasted like home, my Kingsland Road, a home to people who long ago left their own home, and that criss-crossedness is what I love about multi-ethnicity. I chomped through it. The leaky lamb juice on my plate was syrupy, smoke-kissed. I could tell that Ocakbaşı Koksmuts Cinar was a cut above the rest because of my side plates: the homemade flatbread was fresh off the hot plate, still a little translucent with heat. The side of vegetables, which I watched be cut, tasted as good as they looked.

Nefis is another place that came recommended to me, but for their pide, which are flatbreads topped with all manner of delicious things, edges folded over. I had mine with sucuk, a Turkish sausage concentrated with flavour. I ordered the ‘one’ portion. The waiter sized me up and said I should go for the ‘one-and-a-half’ portion. I told him summer was coming, and I’m glad I did: this was a pide longer than me. The dough was soft like ancient parchment, and I loved its ensconcedness – if you’ll allow me to coin that concept. It’d mean the way ingredients are lovingly protected by dough. It came with a side of shredded lettuce and pickled cabbage, and also a hairy mound of parsley, the best palate cleanser.

Nefis.

There are other Javastraat delights, Tigris & Eufraat, Bakkerij Kardaas, but really the magic of the road is the road itself. Community – this is what it comes down to, I think. I can feel the community belonging to this road. I’ve been in Amsterdam close to one and a half years now, and I’ll fully admit that it’s not been easy making friends. I don’t think I’m an awful person, though my failed friend dates might disagree. It’s a strange mix of crowds in this city. There is a saturation of transient expats (can’t we just call ourselves immigrants, which is what we are?) and clearly a tension that follows: I had to take down the first video I ever posted online, which was a fairly innocuous video of me excited about our new apartment, because the anti-immigrant crowd found me, then proceeded to dox me by posting the address.

I don’t want to get involved in the debate. I want to eat good food. With good people. It’s another reason I’m running FEEST. I’m taking what I love from home, that stretch of Kingsland Road that’s diverse and delicious, inclusive but chaotic, and offering it up to Amsterdam, as best as I can, for two nights.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to sit in the sun, and I’m sure once I’m soaked through with light, I’ll be reaching for a Turkish cookbook.

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OK BYE!

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