Istanbul Restaurant, Lytham

Thirty years ago this year I was lucky enough to spend the better part of a month in Turkey, visiting Istanbul, the Aegean coast, the Mediterranean coast (where I saw lots of hotel foundations going in, foreshadowing the  package-holiday-ification of those miles of beautiful, empty beaches), the central Anatolian plateau and the frankly weird Cappadocia.  All beautiful in their own way, and everywhere characterised by an almost overwhelming friendliness.

Apologies for the quality of these photographs from 1984: they are photographs of prints, the original Kodachrome slides having long ago gone astray.

Istanbul in 1984

Fisherman selling his catch, Istanbul, 1984

Particularly phallic geology in Cappadocia

Brush seller, somewhere in Turkey, 1984

It was fabulous, and my first introduction to the shared food culture of the eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. Restaurants in Istanbul and Konya, where the menu consisted of going into the kitchen and looking in various pots and fridges; charcoal-grilled döner kebab from a street stall outside the Grand Bazaar, grilled meats, grilled fish, fried fish from a boat bobbing in the Golden Horn, still the best ever börek, lahmacun from street traders, and the list could go on and on.

Sadly, in the north west, there are few opportunities, beyond the many dodgy kebab shops, for this genre of cooking.  The excellent Lebanese evening with Chateau Musar at the Parkers Arms was a noble exception, and I wish we could persuade Stosie Madi, chef-patron of the Parkers Arms to allow this part of her heritage to show through more on her menus.

When I heard that a Turkish restaurant had opened in Lytham, in the building formerly occupied by the much missed Hastings, I realised that it couldn't be a dodgy kebab operation, given the size of the building, and a quick google found the website for Istanbul Lytham, which, despite a certain charming amateurishness, suggested there was some ambition here.

Istanbul Lytham has had the benefit of moving straight into an already fully-equipped restaurant, and have done really very little indeed to the old Hastings, even down to some of the photographs on the walls remaining.  There has been a light refurb, recovering some seating with Turkish fabrics, and adding a shisha pipe, but that's about it.  Certainly at lunchtime when I've been, what used to be the bar area is used for dining, with the large split level dining areas to the rear remaining unused.  Certainly on the numbers that have been eating there when I've been for lunch, it's difficult to understand how they can support such a large property.  I hope they do, as it's something fresh, different and really pretty good, and a welcome addition to Lancashire's Fylde Coast.

The menu has a reasonably extensive selection of meze, apparently all made in-house apart from the stuffed vine leaves (yaprak dolma).  A nifty bit of up-selling from the waiter pointing out the six meze for £18 offer was too much for a pair of old bargain hunters to resist.  I enjoyed these much more than what I'm about to write seems to make out.  They're not going to win any best meze competitions, but that's also what I remember about meals in Turkey 30 years ago: it's all pretty good and seems better at the time, but is ultimately fairly simple and falls below the standard of what we're led to believe was the greatness of Ottoman cuisine.

Falafel (foreground), Mantar Dolma, Humus Kavurma, bread, Muska Börek (background left to right)

The falafel weren't the best I've had, and were oddly dark., but they also weren't the worst.  Curiously, the dark colour didn't seem to reflect them having been overcooked.  Mantar Dolma were mushrooms stuffed with a lightly garlic-flavoured chicken mousse then breaded and deep-fried.  For me the breading and deep frying didn't add much worthwhile.
Humus Kavurma was splendid: a good humus topped with a lamb casserole.  The börek were the best of this little selection: cheese, pine kernels and herbs in a light pastry.
Also very good was the sucuk, a spicy Turkish sausage (below): noticeably different to any of the readily available chorizo sausages at least, and with a nice, gentle, well-balanced spicing.

Sucuk

I also find the bread very good.  It's a sort of leaven seeded not flat flatbread.

Chicken börek

Oddly, the chicken börek was quite different to the cheese börek, and seemed much more spring roll like. Good filling, but I'd have preferred a slightly lighter pastry.

This next dish was supposed to patlican salata (aubergine salad), which I expected to be more like baba ghanoush than the cold imam bayildi it appeared to be.  Given that there is another meze dish which is cold imam bayildi, I wonder whether this was the waiter's error.  Once I'd got over the disappointment, it was rather good.

Patlican salata (or is it imam bayildi?)

Calamari

Some simple calamari were really excellent: light and crunchy on the outside, and beautifully tender squid.

Moving on to main courses, the grills were the star for me, but I think it's such a shame that they don't grill over real charcoal.

Adana kofte

The Adana kofte was terrific: nicely cooked and very pleasantly spiced.  The rice with vermicelli, is worth a mention too.

Iskender mixed grill

The Iskender mixed grill (lamb fillet, chicken thigh and lamb kofte) was also very good, the chicken thigh particularly so having clearly been well marinaded before grilling.  It was served with
yoghurt, tomato sauce and minted brown butter, which I believe is where the name Iskender comes from.

Having had what seemed to be cold Imam Bayildi as one of the meze, the larger main course Imam Bayildi made us regret the duplication, though not when it came to eating it.  The main course version is served hot, with more of that rather good rice.  There's really nothing you can do to make it look pretty on the plate though.

Imam Bayildi

The menus skip over the notion of dessert, which is odd as they produced some rather good baklava. The waiter said they make it themselves, which struck me as a bit strange, given the effort involved and the fact they don't really sell it.  But it was noticeably fresher tasting, and a little less sweet than most of what I've found commercially available in the north west.

Baklava

Turkish coffee is available, and pretty good, but again they somewhat curiously don't make any song and dance about it.  When we returned for a second visit, they had even run out of Raki.  The wine list is a little peremptory and unfortunately only has four Turkish wines - two whites, two reds.  They could do better than that, I think.  Though I guess more Turkish wines would need selling.  Service is friendly and welcoming, but tends to the "excellent choice" or "that's my favourite" response to everything you order.

Reading through what I've written about Istanbul Restaurant in Lytham, it sounds like I've a bit of a downer on it.  It's not perfect, but I've enjoyed my two visits so far very much, it's something a bit different on the Fylde coast, and am sure I'll be going back soon.

Artisan Restaurant, Booths, Lytham

Eating in-store is usually an unrewarding last resort of the desperately hungry.  Eating in a supermarket all the more so.

But, to borrow a phrase, Booths is not just any supermarket.  Indeed some years ago they specifically dropped the word supermarket, and I like to think of them as a small chain of grocery shops.  They have long been champions of local food, and have more recently been working with Slowfood UK on bringing some of England's Forgotten Foods onto their shelves.

Booths is often called the Waitrose of the North, but it would be more accurate to call Waitrose the Booths of the South, as Waitrose is something of a newcomer compared to Booths.  Edwin Henry Booth opened his first shop in Blackpool (then little more than a seaside village) in 1847: it would be nearly fifty years before Wallace Waite and Arthur Rose opened their first shop in West London in 1904.  An Edwin Booth is still at the helm of Booths.

Lytham was the first branch (originally opened in 1879) in what has become a chain of 28 shops across the north west, though the current store is a new construction.  Booths has long had restaurants attached to its stores (indeed, my grandmother worked in the café at Booths in St Annes in the 1950s), but in the last decade there has been something of a renaissance, beginning at their Kendal store, for which Steven Doherty, the first British head chef in a Michelin 3-star restaurant (Le Gavroche), consulted when the Artisan restaurant there first opened.

The Artisan restaurant at Booths in Lytham, is a large airy space above the store, adjacent to the art gallery (oh yes, there's an art gallery in this branch of Booths too ... you don't get that in Asda...).  The menu is nothing especially striking, and as you would expect, given the location and its association, seeks to be many things to many people. There is a fairly extensive breakfast section, which from 11.30 a.m. gives way to a fairly standard brasserie menu, drawing heavily on produce available on the fresh food counters of the store below. Which made it all the more odd to be told that they had run out of burgers.  How do you run out of burgers when there is an extensive butchery counter, including various varieties of pre-made burgers, attached to the restaurant?  But it's not all shop and serve: there's some real cooking going on too.

I started with some Eggs Benedict.  Rather than the standard English muffin, these came on a larger base, which I suspected might have been Greenhalgh's oven bottom muffins.  There was a very generous helping of excellent roast ham, with a couple of neat, poached eggs on top.  In contrast to the generous amount of ham, I thought they had been a little mean with the hollandaise, which itself could have done with a bit more punch.  But for £5.95, it's difficult to criticise, and I'd have no qualms about ordering it again.

Eggs Benedict

 The main menu is supplemented by a brief daily specials, so brief that you wonder if it's worth printing it.

For a main course I chose the Pan Fried Hake with shrimp risotto from the specials menu.  The only criticism I could possibly have of this was that it might have been better described as shrimp risotto with pan-fried hake, given the relative proportions.

The hake itself was perfectly cooked (which is not bad going for the graveyard mid-afternoon shift, when you might expect the cooks to be out the back having a smoke), and the risotto too was spot on - not overcooked and gluey, as can so easily be the case.  There was a very generous helping of shrimps in the risotto: it would have been nice to think they were Lytham shrimps, but I suspect it's more likely they were (unfortunately) the Dutch brown shrimps (equally unfortunately) usually sold in Booths stores. If anyone from Booths reads this and would like to enlighten/correct me, I'd love to hear from you.  But they and the risotto that contained them were still very tasty.  This really was a very impressive dish by any standards, and all the more so, given that it came out of a grocery store café at half past three on a Saturday afternoon.  It was also excellent value at £9.25 - in fact, most main courses are under £10.

Readers of my website and blog might have picked up that I'm a bit of a sucker for what we used to call French Fried Onions, but which now seem to be just called battered onion rings. (I wonder when and why that changed?)  They're not a bad test of a kitchen: can they make a good batter?, do they clean their deep-fryer regularly?, can they deep fry food accurately?  The beer batter on these was obviously quite thick to start with (probably a batch of batter made earlier in the day), and also quite thickly applied.  The kitchen failed a little here, as the cooking was a bit uneven, with a couple of rings really needing a few seconds more in the fryer.  Being that little bit underdone gave them a bit of a feel of an onion-flavoured doughnut.

Hake with onion rings towering in the background

 Presumably as it was mid-late afternoon, I wasn't shown a wine list, but looking at it later, it serves it purpose well, and, with prices between £10 and £20 a bottle, isn't going to damage anyone's wallet.   I think it might be nice to see a corkage deal on wines bought downstairs, and what I particularly missed was the opportunity to buy a glass of  Booths' latest wheeze, #BoothsSecret, an unlabelled great value, cheap red, only available retail by the case.

I just had a small bottle of ginger beer, and also decided not to have coffee after seeing two utterly vast bowls of coffee being brought to the next table, with the announcement that these were their flat whites.  I have to say I've never seen anything looking less like a flat white.  I think some barista training could be useful, if that were typical.  Service, however, was very good.

So, in summary, not faultless, but an impressive performance, and undoubtedly a useful addition to the restaurants of Lytham, which, since the closure of The Hastings, generally lack distinction.

Note that Booths Artisan Restaurant is open daytimes only.