A World of Taste in a Tiny Kitchen: Can Oba Restaurant

In the alleyways of Sirkeci, your mind gets filled with the murmurs of the store owners who are in deep conversation with each other sitting on the stools in front of their stores. You pass by a green grocer and enter a restaurant. The ice-cold beverages in the refrigerator just across the restaurant flirt with your eyes as your body is already beaten by the heat. After roving your eyes around the chairs covered with artificial leather, the formica tables, the cutlery served in paper bags, the television mounted high on the wall and a few spotlights on the side of the restaurant; you could feel bound to say “lentil soup, small portion and Adana, please,” but the serving man acts before you and say “Hello, I’m Can Oba, the chef of the restaurant. Welcome!”

 

Right after this moment, the lentil soup becomes bouillabaisse and the kebab becomes Benedict sirloin steak…

 

Seafood Soup at a Kebab Restaurant

 

Can Oba has a friendly character with eyes beaming with joy. Following his graduation from the high school, he worked for a restaurant in Germany. After receiving a culinary training, he began to work with one of my friends, Alfons Schuhbeck who was honored as the Chef of the Year. The brilliant chef got promoted to chef de partie and received “the Best Kitchen of the State” award as the sous chef of “Südtiroler Stuben”. With the help of this twenty-years of experience, now he runs a small restaurant at Sirkeci.

 

It is a tiny “eatery” with 4 or 5 tables. I used the word “eatery” because when you step in the restaurant, what you might see stops you from calling it a “restaurant”. The place was used as an ıslama köfte (a type of dish comprised of meatballs between two slices of bread dipped into meat broth) restaurant before and Can Oba bought the place one and a half years ago. With a small oven and a microwave, the size of the kitchen is about a few square meters and run only by Can Oba. In other words, Can Oba is both the owner and the chef of this hidden culinary gem that looks like a regular kebab eatery.

 

We can say the menu of the restaurant almost completely depends on the mood of the chef. Because Can Oba cooks whatever he thinks is fresh that day.

 

You have to have a little patience for the meal. Because, as I mentioned above, the chef starts to prepare the dishes only after you order them. Besides, if you take into account that fact he’s running the kitchen all alone, you have to give him enough time for that.

 

After a long conversation with the chef for the order, we decided to start with corn soup with jumbo shrimp. The soup arrived to our table with a gentle service by the chef. The shrimps were fried with some sesames and there were pieces of nachos floating in the soup. To be honest, neither corn nor its soup are my favorite. So for the feedback I relied on my gastro-sidekick, my daughter Ceylan. She told it was one of the best corn soups she’d ever had.

 

The corn soup was followed by Marseille sea food soup, in other words bouillabaisse. Its content was not that rich. As it was made from sand mussel and sea bass, I definitely felt the absence of fresh shrimps, squid and the other crustaceans. But there is a reasonable explanation for that: fishing ban! As he avoids buying any ready-made or frozen ingredients from the market, the chef told us that he had the difficulty of finding fresh crustaceans due to the current fishing ban. But again, he somehow managed to prepare a royal soup with the ingredients he could find.

 

Vegetarian lasagna was filled with spinach and goat cheese.  The pasta was hand-made by the chef. I found the tomato sauce on the pasta was a bit too much. Considering it was a bit gooey, I think the weakest link of the dishes was the vegetarian lasagna.

 

Served with saffron sauce, sea scallops dish was delicious as much as it was pleasing to the eyes with its colorful presentation. Firm to the bite, the sea scallops were served on a bed of spinach which was, again, undercooked a bit and firm.

 

Our next dish was a world classic, benedict sirloin steak. The sauce on the top of the sirloin steak was made from the village eggs, the quality of which was sensible with its smell, taste and color and it was successfully delectable. In my opinion, the meat was overcooked, in other words, cooked a bit more than average. Besides that, as I personally don’t think the goat meat or the lamb meat is quality meat, this dish was not an exception to that. Again, its taste was alright with its successful sauce.

 

The following dish, beef liver was unadulterated with any sauce. In other words, the only taste I could get was from the liver. It was completely natural and some may find its intense taste a bit heavy.  Besides its taste, the garnishes were in a mess. Considering this was the last dish, it was getting late and as the only member of the staff, the chef was tired; we can ignore this detail. Although it is mostly consumed fried and seasoned with red pepper flakes, the liver was served with caramelized onion sauce. On the top of the liver, there were slices of real apple and pear which looked like potato. The actual potato found its way to the recipe in puree form under the liver.

 

Following all the dishes which had big portions, the first dessert to arrive to fill the rest of our stomachs was cheese dessert. I can say it was the most successful dish of the night which tasted like a mixture of sugary ice cream, sorbet and cheesecake. The bottom layer of the dessert had pieces of walnut and croquant and was placed on the top of the caramel sauce. It was on a par with “the kadaifi wrapped custard fritter” that I recently ate at Yeni Lokanta!

 

The next desert was chocolate mousse served in a bowl. It was made with bitter chocolate and garnished with thin sticks made from blackberry sauce and sugar. It was not as good as the cheese dessert was, because of its intense and viscous texture.

 

Since the restaurant doesn’t have a license for alcoholic beverages, Can Oba cannot offer any wine pairing.

 

Considering its location neighboring Hocapaşa Mosque, the restaurant does not necessarily have the license.

 

Can Oba Restaurant is a surprising place that comes up with the kind of dishes you can only find in a refined restaurant to the contrast of your expectations like ezogelin soup or kebab on a stick. You should definitely try eating at the restaurant run by the Chef Can Oba, who somehow manages to make it all happen in a small space which, otherwise, would be sufficient enough to be only an ice cream shop. It is certainly not an easy job to work in that tiny primitive kitchen with limited variety of appliances and achieve the quality of the other fine-dining restaurants around the globe, creating 137 different dishes in total.

 

I look forward to eating dishes made by the chef hopefully in a bigger, clean and well-equipped kitchen in a better neighborhood. And with a glass of wine to drink to that!..

 

Bon appétit and enjoy the taste of life...