Taking a Friday off and meeting my old friend Dave for lunch in Oxford felt like such a good idea when we made our plans. There’s something magical about a long lunch – and especially one on a Friday, starting your weekend before most people, knowing there’s no rush to anything and that, if you choose, you still have two lazy days and lie-ins in your future. What’s not to love about that?

Reality, unfortunately, had other plans. Because the Friday we chose, a couple of weeks ago, was at the height of the latest heatwave and everything was brutal. There seemed to be no other word for it. The rail network struggled, with a slew of cancellations: my train was delayed, Dave’s stopped outside Didcot for what felt like an eternity. Finally disembarking at Oxford it felt, if that were possible, hotter even than Reading – a cruel, searing heat with no respite. All the times that anybody had ever complained about Britain’s indifferent summers were coming back to bite us: I’d say be careful what you wish for, but nobody wished for this.

I grabbed a table outside Society Café with a latte that I immediately realised was the wrong order altogether, and waited for Dave. It turned out that even being in the shade didn’t make matters much more bearable. My little John Lewis fan whirred away, its efforts close to futile, and I got sympathetic looks from the ladies at the next table: I like to say I’m built for comfort, not speed, but I was definitely not built for this.

When Dave arrived we quickly ruled out any more hot beverages and decided on a drink before lunch, opting to get our schlep into East Oxford out of the way first and reward ourselves with a pint. We ruled out taking a bus on the basis that they would be purgatorial, but it’s hard to imagine they could have been more punishing than the walk we did. The High, wide and handsome, was frying in the sunshine with no relief to be found anywhere. We headed over Magdalen Bridge, hot and bothered, and I could already feel the ghost impression of the sunburn on my forehead yet to come.

It didn’t help that Dave’s first choice of watering hole turned out to be closed until 4, or that my backup plan didn’t open until an hour even after that. So eventually, a full three quarters of an hour later, we wound up in the almost-shady and very fetching terrace of the Rusty Bicycle while I drank a pint of cider with indecent haste and wondered if I would ever stop sweating.

Huge, gorgeous-looking chicken burgers turned up at the adjacent tables and I was very tempted to junk this whole restaurant reviewing lark for the day and stay there. Have a burger, drink some of Dodo Pubs’ excellent peach lager, chat and resolve to move no further than walking to the bar or the loo, until it was time to go home. And I nearly suggested it, too, because something about that gruelling heat made doing anything – moving, thinking, deciding – close to impossible.

But we had an appointment with Turkish restaurant Antep Kitchen on the Cowley Road, a place that had been on my list to visit for well over five years. In lockdown, when reviewing restaurants was out of the question, I ran a series of interviews on my blog with some of the great and the good of Reading. It was my tribute to the weekly Q&A in the Guardian, which I read without fail every Saturday.

One of the questions I asked was What one restaurant do you wish you could pick up and drop in Reading?, and when I interviewed Mohamad Skeik, then manager of Reading institution Bakery House, Antep Kitchen was one of the places he chose. And I remember thinking that if the manager of Bakery House said somewhere in Oxford could match it for grilled meats I really should go there one day.

Six years on Skeik has parted company with Bakery House, but his recommendation had always stayed with me and gradually, as I worked my way through reviewing restaurants in Oxford, it moved closer and closer to the top of the list.

It’s been open for nearly 9 years, the name being taken from Gaziantep, the Turkish city widely thought to be the culinary capital of the country and the birthplace of owner Bilal Gilgil. Going inside my first overwhelming sentiment was relief, because despite a huge charcoal grill the full length of the open kitchen, the aircon was on full blast and I experienced a feeling of coolness for the first and only time that day.

Once that euphoria had worn off, I took in my surroundings. It’s quite an attractive restaurant, busy on a Friday lunchtime, with tasteful banquettes and tables, bare brick walls and a plethora of woven lightshades descending from the ceiling in the bigger back room, the one with booths and less natural light. I imagine that space comes in very handy on a hectic Friday or Saturday night – I also imagine it would be hard to hear yourself think there – but I was glad they’d put us in the smaller front room. There’s even a little terrace on the pavement, although you’d have to be certifiable to have eaten there that day.

The thing that really struck me was the sheer diversity of the clientele at Antep Kitchen – all ages, all demographics, all types and sizes of groups seemed to be taking the opportunity to lunch here, from friends to couples to families: they even managed to find space for a pair of middle-aged men on the verge of heatstroke. I was especially impressed by the number of solo diners I saw, all women, who came in, took a table on their own, ordered something off the grill, read a book, ate their food, paid their bills and went on their way.

If Antep Kitchen was anywhere near me I’d be sorely tempted to follow their excellent example of a lunchtime, especially as you can get a two course set menu until 4pm for £14, and they throw in a soft drink with that. But we hadn’t travelled all that way in such arduous circumstances to pick off the set menu, so we immersed ourselves in Antep’s full repertoire. It is a huge menu full of familiar sights, which makes the whole process harder than you’d think. Cold mezze cost no more than £6.50, hot mezze max out at £8.50 and unless you’re having a Turkish pide most of the mains range between £17 and £25.

The majority of those come off the grill, as you’d expect, but there are other options like moussaka, kleftiko and güveç, or Turkish casserole: I doubt Antep Kitchen was shifting many of those, though, on a very hot day. And although there were a couple of vegetarian mains on the menu – vegetable kebab, vegetable güveç – I don’t honestly think you’d bring a vegetarian here unless you didn’t much care for them.

That said, it just so happens that both of our starters were vegetarian. Stuffed vine leaves have been a weakness of mine since that first childhood family holiday to Corfu in 1987 – yes, I am that old – and I’ve always been a sucker for a well-executed one, that freshness of rice and mint, that tang of lemon, that taut green casing.

They always catapult me back to that summer, when I was so skinny, so nerdy and so very English and was suddenly confronted with a different life of heat, indolence and amazing food. But powerful though nostalgia is, I could see through it and realise that these were perfectly good but not amazing. Allegedly they feature both pine nuts and blackcurrant: I could only discern the former, but didn’t miss the latter.

Antep’s falafel were good, too, but felt like an exercise in portion control. Four dense nuggets, very different from their crisp-shelled Lebanese cousins, were genuinely very nice – made with chickpea and broad bean and with the hugely enjoyable surprise of huge, firm chickpeas in their core. I liked them a lot, and they came perched on a smear of houmous that I also quite liked. A little basket of pleasing airy pide came along shortly after, and the whole thing worked well. But at £7.50 did I expect a few more falafel and maybe a little less padding, like the handful of salad from a bag whose main purpose was to squat on half the plate? Possibly.

None of that felt enormously important at the time. We were cool, at last – have I mentioned that it was a hot day? – and we had food in front of us, and a cold beer. An Efe Draft which, confusingly, is not on draft but actually comes in a squat, round glass bottle. And besides we had pushed the boat out for our main, a sharing platter that served two to three people, which meant that as two ravenous people we were about to eat very well indeed.

But being the day it was, nothing had gone completely to plan and nor did this. I will say that the platter which came out was so huge, and our table so packed, that some serious Tetris had to take place to fit everything on, removing some of our starter plates, shifting beer glasses and water glasses and so on. But that might tell you more about the size of the tables, on reflection.

It also tells you something about pacing – this came out five minutes after our starters, which came out ten minutes after our order. Usually I know I’d have a right old whinge about that but I do sometimes know how to read the room, and this kind of room, menu and pricing are for unapologetically casual dining. So my knickers remained untwisted, which under the circumstances was probably for the best.

Here it is. It rather flattered to deceive.

Now, in fairness there was much to like here. It was a greatest hits trawl through the grill section, so you got a skewer of chicken shish, a skewer of lamb shish, a lamb kofte, a skewer of lamb ribs and what might have been two skewers of chicken wings. In terms of quality, you would struggle to fault any of it. The chicken wings were surprisingly good, with excellent char: I broke the habit of a lifetime and ate them with my fingers, without my usual prissiness. And the chicken shish was better still, the marination working its magic.

And those were probably the least impressive things on offer. Lamb ribs were a new one on me but rewarded the effort, the fat glossy and sweet, the whole affair genuinely succulent and a proper revelation; it made me wonder just how good Antep Kitchen’s lamb chops might be, and whether they matched the masterpieces down the train line at Didcot’s Zigana. The kofte was another standout: coarse, gnarly, expertly seasoned and with caramelisation that wasn’t to the detriment of the core.

But the real surprise package for me was the lamb shish: I am so used, even in Greek or Lebanese restaurants that I rate, to making excuses for the shish, finding it more leather-adjacent than I would like. I won’t do that any more, because Antep Kitchen proves that it absolutely doesn’t have to be that way: these were expertly marinated and cooked, with phenomenal texture and a little blush, and I could order and eat them all the live long day.

But again, that padding reared its head. The way it was dished up, with a sheaf of unnecessary rocket heaped on top, felt like it was meant to distract you slightly from the way the protein had been rationed. It came with a single grilled chilli, which I liked, and half a tomato which was distinctly under. And you got both rice and grains: the latter, giant couscous with a faint red hue and, again, whole chickpeas here and there, was well worth the time. The rice less so.

And then there was the salad, which was good but huge, topped with pomegranate and sumac, with a certain pleasing heat and grit. But at the end of the meal there was a lot of salad left, and quite a lot of rice, and that made me think it was out of kilter. It made me wonder whether, if you’d had that shish as your main, you’d have got one skewer or two, because the five things we had felt only just enough between two. I wouldn’t have wanted to split that between three – not unless one of them was a vegetarian, in which case I’d have gladly donated my salad.

Dave tended to agree, I think, and he isn’t as much of a gannet as I am. He liked it, though (“this is far more my kind of thing than fine dining” he said, which made me wonder if he’d quite forgiven me for lunch at Juliet). We did agree, on balance, that it was perhaps another kofte away from being truly satisfying. At least it left room for dessert, I told myself.

Before that, though, we looked at the drinks menu. Neither of us felt like chugging another Efe, but I was intrigued by a few of the things in the soft drinks section. I asked about ayran first, as I’ve always rather liked it, only to be told that they didn’t have any. So that left something called Salgam, billed as refreshing Turkish turnip juice. Did I dare give it a go? I asked one of the brigade of dapper, waistcoated servers.

“The Salgam – is it sweet?”

He gave me the kind of smile that’s hard to read.

“No, it’s spicy.”

How bad could it be, I thought? So I ordered it. And then I found out.

Salgam comes in a bottle with TURNIB on it in block capitals, and an illustration of a barrel with what looks like some kind of mutant cross between a turnip and a giant spider ominously climbing out of it. Tasting it, it didn’t really taste of turnip at all, but of pickle juice. Which I don’t necessarily mind, in its place, but this didn’t feel like its place. I took a slurp with my straw, and Dave enjoyed my discomfort in the way only a very old friend can.

“It’s sort of like a Bloody Mary where they’ve forgotten the vodka and swapped the tomato for, err, turnip.”

“You’re selling it to me, mate.”

“I think for solidarity you should drink what’s left in bottle.” He reluctantly agreed, and took about as long to finish it as I did my whole glass. Maybe it was delirium from the long walk to the restaurant, but I found myself laughing uncontrollably.

“They have a barrel on the bottle” I told Dave, “but this has clearly been made by scraping the bottom of it.”

“It’s not great.”

“The thing is, the more I have of it, the worse it gets.”

I thought to myself that ordering the Salgam was the right decision. It’s what Anthony Bourdain would have told you to do, I suppose, although I’m not sure how good a role model he turned out to be. Anyway, by the time I’d finished it I didn’t dislike it so much, although that might just have been the Gaziantep equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome. Subsequent research has shown that it isn’t even primarily made of turnip, instead being largely the fermented juice of pickled carrots “flavoured with aromatic turnip”, which is surely the best kind of turnip.

I’m glad I tried it, anyway, and that’s more than I can say about, for example, the novels of Zadie Smith.

We closed with desserts which were variations on a single theme but, between them, were strong enough to redeem some of the flaws that had gone before. Dave’s kadayifi was a brick of that familiar Shredded-Wheat-a-like, baked in sweet syrup and carpet-bombed with pistachio, topped with a scoop of good vanilla ice cream. It looked the part, and tasted good enough that Dave didn’t envy the baklava turning up at the next table: four generous pieces, clustered round more of the ice cream.

I think, uncharacteristically, I did better. I’d seen a video of the restaurant making their künefe on social media and it completely sold me on it: two layers of that crispy fried dough sandwiching a gooey core of stretchy cheese. The same syrup – the whole thing swimming in it, instead – and the same festooning of pistachio, but for me an infinitely more satisfying dessert. One of more contrasts and extremes, the syrup heightening the peaks of sweetness and yet, somehow, the cheese adding an almost savoury note that stopped it all being oppressive.

Our bill for two came to £113.30, not including service – and I thought the service was very good, even if they didn’t stage an intervention when I tried to order fermented pickled carrot juice. You could eat there for less, especially on the set, but I think there are probably better ways to spend money there than ours. Have a main each, stay away from the platter and maybe make the most of the wine list: Antep Kitchen stocks half a dozen Turkish wines, and none will set you back more than £30 a bottle. As we left the restaurant I saw, out on the pavement, a huge pallet loaded with charcoal, and I wondered whether the coals would get hotter than I’d felt.

Our day in Oxford ended as it began: stagger to a pub, have a pint in the beer garden and find that the beer garden is intolerable. Take the pint inside and find that inside is also intolerable. In the end we wound up drinking alcohol free beer at the Tap Social pub in the Covered Market, finding that “least hellish” was the best we could settle for. Dave’s train home stopped in Didcot for reasons that were never explained beyond the general inadequacy of our rail network, he took two hours to get home and missed some of the evening’s World Cup match. It was not our finest meal out together, but we concluded that it was still a better way to spend Friday than being at work.

And Antep Kitchen played a part in that: not only because of its excellent air conditioning but because it’s a brilliant illustration of, as Mohamad Skeik said in 2020, a restaurant you would love to pick up and drop on your doorstep. Any neighbourhood would be lucky to have it, and its neighbourhood definitely is. But is it worth crossing the country to visit? Much as I liked it I am less sure of that, but I’m really glad I’ve tried it. Just bear in mind some of the other things I’ve said that about recently: Salgam, I’m looking at you.

Antep Kitchen – 7.5
228-230 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1UH
01865 247555

https://www.antepkitchen.co.uk

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