My Turkish Delight

Ever since my 2009 holiday in Istanbul I've loved Turkish pizza. It is quite a bit different from any other style of pizza. It is a boat shaped bread with cheese and butter but without sauce. It is often topped with feta, mint, egg, various pastrami, or hard cheese. 

I read about Babaji a few weeks ago and knew I should go there with my brother-in-law who first introduced me to Turkish pizza. We headed to Piccadilly Circus one day for lunch while my sister was at a conference. 

The decor was beautiful with loads of Iznik blue tiles. It reminded us of Turkey in many ways, one of which is that the toilet was on the top floor as most are in Turkey. 

Sour cherry juice is really popular in Turkey. This was delicious and reminded me of a less sweet version of grenadine. 

For appetisers, we ordered hummus and baked halloumi cheese. The hummus in Turkey is thicker and has less tahini (sesame seed paste) than hummus from other parts of the Middle East. Halloumi is having a heyday in London right now and Babaji's did not disappoint. It was amazing with the cherry tomatoes. The bread that we dipped into the hummus was freshly made and was fluffy and delicious with amazing flavour.

Zach ordered Kayseri pizza which comes with beef pastrami and kasar cheese. I ordered the Karides Pide (pide is the name of the Turkish style pizza) with prawn, tomato, green pepper, and kasar cheese. I preferred the pizza Zach ordered. Mine tasted a bit too fishy but it was still pretty tasty.

Since the appetisers and mains were so delicious we thought that the desserts would be the same but sadly they were just okay. Nothing to really go crazy for. We ordered the rice pudding with sour cherry and the pistachio baklava with clotted ice cream. The baklava was disappointing because it didn't have many layers of filo dough. The best description I can come up with is that it was more like a sweet pistachio filled egg roll than baklava. The rice pudding was the better of the two desserts by far.  

I thought this drawing of an Ottoman last supper on the menu was really cute. I love that they are only eating Turkish pizza.

I gotta say, Babaji is my new favourite restaurant in London. Their authentic Turkish food was delicious and I just couldn't get enough of the delicious bread. I will be looking for any excuse to come back here again in the near future.