Meat Point
Meat Point does Turkish breakfasts as well as kebabs and mezze.
There’s an amazing smoky smell as soon as you walk in, similar to loosely affiliated Barans in Scarborough.
Also like Barans, all decor in this completely updated space is imported from Turkey, though this place is smaller, unlicensed and has a more cafe-like feel.
While Turkish breakfast typically comprises many non-cooked elements, it typically centres around a dish of eggs and sujuk, sliced and cooked with the eggs, which here are sunny-side-up and perfectly runny.
Use homemade flatbread as a vehicle for everything, beautifully spongy with a floury, stiff crust and a very fluffy inside.
Other nibbles that are part of the textbook Turkish breakfast spread include feta and mozzarella, honey, Nutella, yogurt, sweet pepper paste, cucumber, tomato, and gelid, sweet house strawberry and raspberry jams.
It all has to be accompanied by bitter-but-fragrant Turkish tea, served table-side from a special charcoal-burning samovar that even keeps the teapot warm.
Paca soup ($7) is quite common and popular in Turkey. Apparently when you’re stumbling out of the club there, tongue soup is the thing to get.
A very simple but rich, fatty and velvety dish of tongue in a broth made of its own cooked-down stock, flour and water topped with generous golden pools of butter and paprika, it’s finished off with a few spoonfuls of flavourful garlic sauce stirred in.
The Pasha Sultan mixed kebap ($40) requires at least two people to order it and is presented on a vintage serving platter from Turkey.
The platter comes with a basic starter salad along with dips of pepper paste and haydari, a cooling blend of yogurt, mint, garlic and olive oil.
On the side, there’s regular rice as well as “red rice” or bulgur rice, sweet, earthy and pearly.
This platter is actually meant for four, and is a meat smorgasbord of spicy minced lamb and veal kebap, chicken and veal doner, and chunks of chicken and veal shish. Skewered items are grilled and doner meats are cooked on an upright spit.
Doner sandwiches ($7 - $8) deliver the world-class meats cooked here more casually, in the same fluffy bread with an option for chicken or “meat,” which here usually means veal, simply accompanied by lettuce, onion and tomato.
For dessert there’s kadayif and antep sarma ($6), the former strings of dough with crumbled pistachio soaked in syrup; the latter rolls of thin dough with strong pistachio flavour.
Like tea at breakfast, you can’t have dessert without strong Turkish coffee.
The name Meat Point was intended to have a double meaning, also sort of a “meeting point,” the pin-drop icon meant to look a little reminiscent of a rotating spit.
Hector Vasquez