3rd Round - Iskender kebab (Dinner - lamb)
There's a story behind this one. My uncle, a lifelong bachelor who everyone assumed would never marry, finally did, sometime around 2012 or so. His wife, now my aunt, is a lovely Turkish woman, about 15 years his junior and only like 4-5 years older than me. While they had been legally married in the US, it was important to her to have a traditional Turkish ceremony back home. So that's how my family, plus my aunt and a couple of cousins, ended up in Central Turkey, in the industrial city of
Kayseri, for a few days.
I don't know if anyone here has been to Turkey. It's a great country, the nicest people, unbelievable historical sites, the Blue Mosque is the most beautiful building I've ever seen. Anyway, most tourists never go east past Istanbul, or maybe the resort cities like Izmir on the Mediterranean coast. Kayseri, in contrast, is very much not a tourist town. Think of a mid-sized US grimy manufacturing city, and then add a splash of very conservative Islam.
The first day we're there - literally our first day in the country and my first ever setting foot in Asia - it's just a whirlwind. Totally and completely foreign to anything I'd ever experienced. My aunt's parents are amazing hosts - they're so happy that their daughter is getting married, and so happy that my uncle has had family coming all the way from America for the ceremony. They insist that we must go out for a nice dinner. So we do, to
Elmacioglu, which is apparently one of the finest restaurants in all of Kayseri.
We get there, it's a nice place, white-glove waiters, basically just looks like a giant ballroom. The only problem is that the menu is entirely in Turkish. And the only person in the place who seems to speak both English and Turkish is my aunt. She attempts to decipher the menu but it's chaos, there's like 10 of us at the table, just all over the place. My brother and I settle on Iskender kebobs. I have no idea what I've just ordered but the waiter seems to approve.
A few minutes later, the plates come out.....and I'm greeted with a dinner plate the size of my head, piled high with like 2 pounds of thinly sliced lamb, well-seasoned but not spicy, in a delicious tomato-based sauce. A couple pieces of roasted tomato and peppers, a corner of the plate devoted to yogurt, and a pita. I know I've made the right decision. I'm about to dive in...until....
The waiter comes over, super fancy, white gloves, and he's got what appears to be a gravy boat. In America, they'll come to your table and freshly crack pepper for you. But in Turkey, when you order an Iskender kebab, they're coming with a gravy boat full of ####### melted butter. And they're gonna pour it all over that lamb until you tell them to stop, until the lamb is drowning in a butter and tomato sauce.
I'm not going to say it's the best meal of my life, that would be a lie. But it is probably the single most memorable meal of my life. And for that reason, I have to pick it here.
