Turkish food in Dubai: the grills, and the breakfast to seek out

Breakfast, and how to do it

It arrives as a table, not a plate: small dishes of white cheese and aged cheese, black and green olives, sliced tomato and cucumber, honey with kaymak (a thick clotted cream) several jams, boiled or fried eggs or menemen, and a basket of bread that gets refilled.

It is designed to be shared and to take time, and it is served with black tea in small tulip glasses, refilled continuously. Two people can eat it for AED 80 to 140 total, and neither will need lunch. The places that do it well are busy on Friday and Saturday morning and quiet on a weekday.

Pide and lahmacun, which are not pizza

Pide is a boat-shaped flatbread baked with a filling (cheese, minced lamb, spinach and egg) and it comes out of the oven closed at the ends and open in the middle. Lahmacun is thin, round, unleavened, spread with a fine spiced meat mixture, and eaten rolled around lemon juice and parsley.

Both cost a fraction of a pizza and are cooked to order in the same kind of oven. Lahmacun in particular, at AED 15 to 30, is one of the cheapest good things to eat in Deira.

The grills

Turkish grilling differs from Lebanese in the cuts and the seasoning, more lamb, more use of tail fat for flavour, adana and urfa kebabs distinguished by chilli heat, and iskender served over bread with butter poured at the table.

A mixed grill for two at a solid Al Rigga place is AED 90 to 160 and comes with bread, salad and rice or bulgur. It is more food than most tables expect.

Baklava and the pastry shops

The dedicated Turkish pastry shops in Deira sell baklava by weight, and buying a mixed half-kilo across four or five types is both cheaper and better than ordering a single portion in a restaurant. Pistachio-heavy versions cost more and are worth it.

Kunefe is the other one to try, and it has to be eaten hot, shredded pastry over stretchy cheese, baked and soaked in syrup, served straight from the oven. It does not survive being taken away.

Coffee, tea and practicalities

Turkish coffee is served unfiltered in a small cup with the grounds settling at the bottom, sweetened to order (ask for sade for none, orta for medium) and it comes with a glass of water. Do not drink the last mouthful.

Tea comes throughout the meal rather than after it. Most of the Deira and Al Rigga places are unlicensed and stay open late, and none of them require booking except for weekend breakfast, which is worth arriving early for.

Where the restaurants cluster

Turkish food in Dubai has two distinct homes and they produce different experiences. The first is the run of large, comfortable restaurants in and around the malls and the newer districts, aimed at families and doing the full menu properly, from breakfast through to the grills and the pastry counter.

The second is smaller and older, concentrated in the creek districts and around Al Rigga, where the places are plainer, the trade is local and the bill is considerably smaller. The bakeries and pide counters in those streets are the ones residents send each other to.

Neither is better as a category. The mall tier is where to take a table of eight at nine in the evening without a reservation; the creek tier is where the lahmacun costs a few dirhams and comes out of a wood-fired oven you can see from the counter.

Breakfast is the meal to prioritise if you only eat one.