The typical food you get in a Turkish restaurant doesn’t represent how I ate growing up. In restaurants, you’ll often find a certain set of late-summer ingredients — aubergines, courgettes, tomatoes. But Turkish home cooking is very seasonal. At this time of the year, we’ll be cooking with winter greens, rhubarb and foraged ingredients such as wild garlic and nettles.
My dad, Ali, has had the Mangal restaurant in London for 30 years. When I took over as head chef at Mangal 2, my point of reference was the food my mother, Cemile, cooked for us. She’s the unsung hero of our family’s cooking. The recipes here are real Turkish home cooking, with everything done in my mum’s style. Other than the soup and pudding, it’s all designed to be eaten together. There are certain elements you’ll always have with a Turkish meal: a mix of smoky and sour flavours, light and heavy dishes, always some sort of wrapped dish and a yoghurt. It’s only possible to eat these dishes with multiple people, which is why they’re mainly served at
