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In Search of Turkey Day in Turkey

OK, OK, it's a pretty lame joke. But isn't there some perverse logic in celebrating Turkey Day in a Turkish restaurant?

After consulting with scouts inside and outside the Turkish Embassy, we checked out several of the favored Turkish restaurants in the region -- who knew there were so many! -- and settled on Temel as the best of the crummy but good places we had tried.

Temel just barely qualifies for the honor of enjoying Crummy status. True, it hides in the back corner of a small obscure shopping center, nestled between the dry cleaners and the Poodle Parlor. And one does have to circle Fairfax Circle, plus how many restaurants serve cigars with the meal? Once inside the Poodle Parlor and Crummy disappear from memory in the gleam of white table clothes, polished wooden tables that match, fresh fake flowers, not-cheap prices and a water fall.

MSnuggled in between a dry cleaner and a Poodle Parlor in a small shopping center, far, far away...

Manager Alex Gudal prepares the table for a Turkish version of Thanksgiving Dinner

Chef and owner Ismet Gezgec takes fresh pede bread out of the Temel ovens

Baklava!

The spinich pizza was an unusual but tasty combination.

Our friendly waiter, Mehmet Keskin, helped us put together a Turkish equivalent of a Thanksgiving dinner, starting with cigars. Temel's cigars are an appetizer, a cheese pastry with feta cheese, parsley and dill wrapped in a cigar-shaped light, sweet, crisp phyllo dough and deep fried. Not only are they good, but if your parents aren't around, you can pretend to smoke them like a big shot tycoon.

Lentil soup. I have never sung the praises of lentil soup, which has always been in my brocolli-cod liver oil food group, something you ate mostly because your Mom said to. But this lentil soup was light with just an unexpected hint of peppermint, and something that will be ordered again. Next course was chicken guvec, a stew of mixed vegetables and chicken served with rice. Good, especially the eggplant, but once we tasted the lamb, who could guvec again?

The Turkish feast required lamb, which we took in the form of adana, ground lamb marinated with garlic, paprika and peppers, cooked on a skewer and served with fresh-made pede bread, which is like pita but thicker and darker. In the words of "Sally Meets Harry," Oh yes, yes, yes! We should have had a traditional coban salad in the middle of the table, but we didn't. We barely had room left for the traditional baklava -- nice and light on a plate too pretty for us -- and Turkish coffee -- very not light. Oh to be in Turkey, now that Turkey Day is here.

Footnotes: Yes, they make good, boat-shaped Turkish pizzas at Temel, including some interesting vegetarian varieties that offer a base of feta or Turkish kaser cheese. Part of the fun is meeting all the spices that Grandma never used. The Turks, after all, were in control of the Spice Road for a thousand years while my Irish ancestors never ventured much beyond boiled potatoes.

And while you are endlessly circling Fairfax Circle looking for the Temel Restaurant, don't forget Payton Anderson, who while on picket duty at Fairfax Circle became the first Confederate wounded in the Civil War. I don't think that's how Old Pickett Road got its name, but it makes a nice story.