Lisa's Turkish Kitchen: Ridgewood, NJ: first impressions
Lisa's Turkish Kitchen, a local family-owned business, quickly opened in the space where Ivangie Tea used to live in Ridgewood, NJ.
Some random thoughts:
I don't know much about Turkish food.
The room is spacious and colorful.
We ordered the Karisik Meze (Mixed appetizers, 11.95), which included hummus, lebni, eggplant salad, babaganush, stuffed grape leaves and ezme salad.
The ezme salad was excellent. I've never had this dish, so I have no baseline for comparison. But it was really super. As was the hummus. The smoky eggplant salad was great. In fact, the whole plate was very good. We're definitely ordering that ezme salad again.
We also ordered the mixed grill (23.95), in order to try as much as possible. This included Adana (ground lamb), doner (ground lamb), lamb sish, chicken sish, and kofte kebab.
The chicken was only as good as one might expect. The lamb dishes were all great, although I thought the kebab was a bit overcooked. In fact, we liked the ground lamb components the most.
The menu is incredibly hard to read. The cursive font is painful on the eyes. easy to read, now that they've reworked the fonts.
There are a bunch of fish dishes, including a whole fish.
Our dinner happened to be on their second night. Even so, the service seemed quite eager and showed promise. I'll not mention slip-ups as they should be afforded the chance to tighten it all up a bit.
Seems like a winner.
Lisa's Turkish Kitchen : 54 Chestnut Street : Ridgewood, NJ : 201.251.8686 : BYOB
What exactly is ezme salad? It's not something that I've heard of before.
Posted by: chefdave | January 10, 2007 at 10:40 PM
Chef, you're not the only one.
It's described as "Spiced Mashed Vegetables: a mixture of minced tomatoes, hot spices, garlick oinions, pepper paste, walnuts, peppers, olive oil and lemon juice." sounds pretty good just from that description, don't it?
Posted by: tommyeats | January 11, 2007 at 07:06 AM
Yeah.....sounds pretty good. Is the dish in the front of the first food picture?
Posted by: chefdave | January 11, 2007 at 06:13 PM
yes'sir it is. i'm looking forward to a big pile of it on my next visit.
Posted by: tommyeats | January 11, 2007 at 11:05 PM
My brother and I took our mother there for her birthday last week....and what a great decision it was!
Our menu sounds an awful lot like tommy's menu from his first visit....the mixed Meze appetizer to share, then entrees of mixed grill, whole grilled fish (branzino maybe?), and my mother had a lamb dish in a tomato sauce with "croutons" (can't remember the name, but it was damn good, especially as left-overs)
All three of us thought the food was outstanding. The service was a little rought, mostly because our waiter didn't really speak very much English, so getting answers to questions was sometimes a challange. But we perservered, and came out the better for it in the end.
Definitely worth worth the trip...just go with a big appetite.
Posted by: chefdave | February 13, 2007 at 11:27 PM
If you like Turkish food, try Lodos in New Milford. It's on River road, diagonally across the road from the Hudson City bank branch. If you blink, you'll miss it. Great, authentic, beautifully prepared and presented Turkish food.
Posted by: brilliantatbreakfast | June 09, 2007 at 03:43 PM