Ciğerci Ali Baba: A Place Where “Chopped Liver” Takes on a Better Meaning

After they had mastered their butchery skills while working for a slaughterhouse, they would hit the streets to sell liver door to door, all packed into the zinc-coated wooden boxes on their backs. In addition, they would coat the offal with flour and season it with a generous amount of salt and red pepper, and sell it to restaurants, which is why this masterpiece recipe is called “Arnavut ciğeri” in Turkish meaning “Albanian liver”.

If you order “liver” at a restaurant today, you will likely be served the Albanian recipe that I mentioned above. While this historical recipe is adulterated by many restaurants with the use of low-quality or wrong ingredients and wrong cooking techniques; it is even more difficult to find a good “yaprak ciğer,” a slightly different liver recipe named after the shape of its slices that resembles a leaf (tr. yaprak).

Located in the peaceful town of Ürkmez in İzmir, Ciğerci Ali Baba is a quite an enjoyable restaurant that I would recommend to people who are on the hunt for the best place to eat liver.

Ali Usta had been working as a computer engineer for many years until he fell in love with culinary arts. Shortly after discovering his passion, he started a new career with the “tradesman restaurant” he opened in Alsancak --which is a small and casual type of Turkish restaurant that’s popular among local shopkeepers especially for lunches. When the 2001 economic crisis hit the eatery which he was running in partnership with a friend of his, he had to leave that boat before it sank deeper. Instead, he and his wife decided to open a liver restaurant in the location it still occupies today.

4 tables, 4 stove tops, 4 pans…

Fashioned out of a tea house, the restaurant started its journey with tiny baby steps. Thanks to the culinary mastery of Ali Usta and the skilled hands of his wife from the city of Adana, the eatery eventually turned into great success as its name reached the right people.

With a new face resembling a Greek tavern, the restaurant continues to serve its visitors at the same tables in a modest ambiance without even needing a signboard.

Unlike at those restaurants where offal becomes inedible because of improper care in its preparation; at Ciğerci Ali Baba, liver slices which look like “yaprak döner” are cleaned with great care, and their sinews are nicely removed. They, then, meet the oil before it gets hot. After additions of some black pepper and cumin, it is fried while onion and sumac are having a tryst to accompany it later. When the liver is cooked to a turn, it is removed from stove and served.

The only thing that bothered me was the cumin sprinkled on top of the liver after it was done. I asked Ali Usta not to go that extra mile for my dish. If you too would like to get a better and plainer taste out of the liver, don’t forget to tell the chef that you don’t want extra cumin in your dish.

I can say that the sidekicks of the restaurant are as good as the main course. Cranberry bean, faba bean, şakşuka, grilled eggplant, atom yoghurt, sun-dried tomato, artichoke hearts, çökelek salad, and olives are among the kind of dishes that made me grateful that I am living in the Aegean region. Prepared quite the way I like it, içli köfte (kibbeh) was boiled instead of being fried. With its delectable juicy filling locked inside its thin crust, it would beat its counterparts from the eastern regions of Turkey.

What I most care about the street food restaurants is where they stand between looking casual and being dirty separated by a thin red line… Some might alternate between the two sides of the coin from time to time, and sometimes it is just a bad hair day for the restaurant. As a person who witnessed in the Far East either extreme ends of these categories, it does not take much effort for me to say Ciğerci Ali Baba is definitely on the casual side. It would be meaningless to expect luxury from a small liver restaurant.

Praised by its regulars who say the chopped liver takes on a whole new meaning and turns into a masterpiece, Ciğerci Ali Baba is an invaluable restaurant for the Izmirians to experience…

Bon appétit and enjoy the taste of life…

Mersin Alanı Mahallesi, 6073. Sk. 19 A, 35485 Seferihisar/İzmir
+905365503060