Mangal Bites Back.

Try not to be too liberal with the BYO policy of Mangal…reviews might fall head-achingly short.

You might have heard about it, many have. If you have not then the first part of what has now become a two-part review, is unlikely to do much to inspire a traverse of London into the East-End and the small road in Dalston that houses the spearhead of London’s Turkish food scene. I’ll try my best.

BYO’s are a truly beautiful thing; a breath of fresh ‘anti-corkage’ air in a city increasingly obsessed with the Cru-Classé of their wine-list and painfully fascist in their approach to corkage as a result. I appreciate the fact that restaurant profit margin revolves heavily around their turnover of wine, but wine, in restaurants most pressingly, remains the juice of the gentry, and unnecessarily so in my view. Can restaurants please take a step back, put the sterling to one side, and let the diner enjoy some guilt-free tipsiness:

“Can I book a table for two please? And would it be okay to bring a special bottle with me for the occasion?”

“Certainly Sir. I’m afraid we charge £40 corkage….” Prolonged silence. “Are you still there Sir?”…

“Sorry, yes I am here, I just momentarily choked on a cork, I’ll be there at 8pm and I’ll probably just order from the list, which is sh*t by the way.” Fascist pig.

Mangal Ocakbasi, on Arcola Street in Dalston, is not one of these places. For licensing reasons, though I would like to remain romantically convinced it’s down to a Samaritan ethos, it is a restaurant where food is eaten and enjoyed as it should be. No tablecloths, no silver, no ‘I must be a good restaurant because I have a Hirst on the wall’, no Riedel stemware, no wine list, no corkage, and thus, no French sommelier. In short, Mangal is a place where you sit without the proverbial rod up your arse and, as such, this is a place I like.

Having queued for as long as you have to (no booking here) with the smells of grilling Adana kebab, the pinnacle of skewered minced lamb, and quail filtering down the line, you enter to see what the Turks, apart from Delights, rugs and war, do best: the grill. The grill lines half the restaurant, a beast of a creation, itself full of various beasts, a cooking workhorse, the Nissan Navarra of the cooking world.

So, you’re halfway into the restaurant and you already feel like an extra in Arabian Nights: hustle, bustle, smoke, fire, foreign smells, slight arousal, noise, heat, sweat, and some over-worked Turk pushing past laden with indecipherable meat: I’m happy, sweaty but happy. The only problem is the sight of everything that you may potentially be eating on arrival does not translate into menu security. “Where has that thing that looked really good on the grill got to on this piece of laminated paper?” Fortunately for the diner, very little on the menu fails.

Now, this is the part where I tell you exactly what to eat, avoid and then order again. But therein the problem lies… I was celebrating: Zeren, myself and four other friends were in party mode and for some unexplained reason I thought a magnum was an appropriate measure (the others all brought bottles). I got excited, arrogant maybe, and abused the BYO. Lesson learnt. I can tell you that the lamb Adana and quails are exceptional. The flat-bread that greets you at the table makes a great mopper for the olive-oil rich hummous-one that sticks both fingers up at the miserable ‘chickpea minus tahini’ effort that a certain unnamed supermarket will offer you. On from that it is a tasty blur. From a receipt found in my pocket the next morning I can tell you that the meal came to about £15 a head.

In many ways, this short drunken story has a moral. There are very few places in London where you can cut loose, celebrate, eat well with friends, leave stuffed, happy, and ready to party with a £15 bill in your pocket. I rewind to my imaginary conversation with Restaurant De La Corkage:

“Certainly Sir. I’m afraid we charge £40 corkage….” Prolonged silence. “Are you still there Sir…?”

“Sorry, yes I am here, I just momentarily choked on a cork, I won’t be there at 8pm; I’ll be at Mangal in Dalston, enjoying my food, my company and my wine.” “Oh, and by the way, its going to cost me f**k all.”

The very nice front-of-house at Mangal might not enjoy a review hailing their treasured restaurant as a house of fun rather than food but they should be..they should be very proud of it indeed.

I will return, I may keep myself in check, I’m thinking Riesling to help on that front, and I will try to review from something closer to the textbook: sharp, concise, and sober. But I probably won’t have as much fun.

The restaurants sticking their necks on the line to provide wine for the masses:

Zucca in Bermondsey is fast making a name for itself as the St John for the Italian tongue thanks to Sam Harris’ bottomless passion and skill regarding all things Italian. Few recognise the wine list. Sam knows his sh*t: a wine list holding the breadth of offerings from Tenuta dell’Ornellaia and Sassicaia is always a good place to start at prices cheaper than anywhere in London. The wine laiaist is constantly evolving so go eat and drink, return a few weeks later and there will probably be something new to try. Great food, great wine. Simple. (183 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3TQ, 0207 378 6809.)

Frontline Club Restaurant Sources all its produce from within 100 miles of its location in Paddington. The wine list, put together by wine-guru Malcolm Gluck, echoes the attention to value, humbleness and provenance in the menu…and then some. £10 flat charge added to every bottle of wine is music to the ears of every wine lover in London. So that means a £30 bottle from a wine merchant will cost you £40…patronising mathematics from me but I just need to get the point across. No 300% mark-ups. Never. Combined with Veal Sweetbreads with asparagus and caper dressing and I don’t really know why I’m writing this and not booking a table for tonight. (13 Norfolk Place, London W2 1QJ, 020 7479 8960.)

Bob Bob Ricard is an unusually good experience. American diner meets underground bourgeois Moscovite hangout is not something one finds everyday of the week. The wine list however has none of the confusion of the restaurant that it finds itself a part of. It is extensive, varied and insane value. Throughout the wine list, without fear, there are notes that inform the diner of the price of the wines at other established London eateries and the difference is remarkable. Romanee-Conti Echezeaux 1996 (not something ordered by many) at £483 compared to £1600 at Alain Ducasse. They have Cheval Blanc, Vega Sicilia, Sassicaia, Guigal, Gaja, Shafer, Beaucastel, D’Yquem, all at comparatively great prices. (1 Upper James Street, London, W1F 9DF, 020 3145 1000.)