A halal homage to Turkey

Restaurant’s Turkish grilled kebabs, lamb and pizza-style flatbread pide shine brightly

Imagine being a San Antonian living in Turkey, 7,000 miles away, homesick for tacos. Flip the script and feel the heartache of Ibrahim Karabiyik, coming to San Antonio from his Turkish hometown of Adana in 1997, homesick for Adana kebab.

Something so simple, just grilled skewers of ground lamb, salt and red pepper, yet so connected to home. When Karabiyik couldn’t find Turkish food he loved in San Antonio, he learned to cook and started making his own at home as he chased his college studies and started his own businesses, including the Junk Yard Dogs Auto Parts salvage yard he still runs today.

A year ago, he took his passion for Turkish food public and opened Chef ’s Table Turkish Mediterranean Grill in a small space next to a Starbucks on Babcock Road just outside Northwest Loop 410.

About the size of a two-bedroom apartment, Chef ’s Table is steeped in Karabiyik’s pride for his Turkish homeland. On the wall, there’s a print of Kemal Atatürk, the revered statesman, soldier and father of modern Turkey. All of the fixtures, the carved wooden tables, the Ottoman chandeliers, even the flatware and most of the kitchen equipment, including the doner grill, came from Turkey.

It’s a more stylish space than you’d expect from the loud strip-mall graphics outside, but casual enough that a little girl lay snoozing across two chairs while her parents enjoyed a quiet dinner. The halal menu matched the aesthetic, with street food swagger punctuated by plumes of herbs and vegetables carved like interlocking puzzles.

If what I tasted was the Adana kebab Karabiyik was chasing, I’m glad he caught it. Served in one radiant strip with ripples like slow ocean waves, the ground lamb held together with perfect uniformity, grilled until the edges began to caramelize. Formed with lamb broken down in-house from the whole animal, the mix favored an almost even split of fat and lean, creating gloss but not grease, glowing with simple salt-and-pepper flavor.

Like all the grill plates at

Chef ’s Table, the Adana kebab came with a toss of onions, herbs, fresh red and yellow peppers, cucumbers and a tart

pomegranate vinaigrette, a pop of color and crunch to enjoy in symphony with the meats, with freshly baked crusty yeast bread for scooping and a strong red pepper relish.

The Adana kebab is just one of 11 styles of meat grilled on skewers, roasted in the oven or shaved off vertical rotisserie spits at Chef ’s Table. Some are familiar, like chicken shish kebab and lamb chops. Some aren’t so familiar, like Iskender kebab and kofte.

The mixed grill plate offered a strong introduction to five of those styles: juicy chicken and lamb shish kebabs cut the size of campfire marshmallows, ribbons of lean chicken doner kebab with a varnished amber finish, slices of lamb-and-beef doner kebab a lot like shawarma but so much better, and a ground patty of lamb and beef called kofte, grilled like a hamburger but leaving all other similarities behind in an aromatic

umami cloud.

Lamb found so many ways to express itself at Chef ’s Table, not all of them flattering. In its most primal form, it came as grilled lamb chops, seared and lightly seasoned, an ungainly presentation with foil still on the bones to keep them from charring. A lamb shank cooked down a degree past its prime in a four-hour braise, leaving parts of it dry and fragmented.

But lamb bounced back as a rich stew called tava, with velvety cuts of meat amplified by tomato gravy perfumed with garlic and peppers. It triumphed again as an integral part of Iskender kebab, a tangle of sliced lamb-and-beef doner kebab finished with tomato sauce as lush as Sunday marinara, dialed in even deeper with brown butter and served with a generous scoop of firm, tangy yogurt for contrast.

Maybe because it’s so mindful of being true to its Turkish

roots, Chef ’s Table seemed least comfortable in its catch-all Mediterranean moments, especially with a soggy lunchtime lamb-and-beef doner wrap that couldn’t decide whether it was a gyro, shawarma or a burrito, so it didn’t work as any of them. And the hard little pucks of fried falafel could have come from any of a dozen lesser shops than Chef ’s Table.

With only a few scattered shrimp dishes and an incongruous fried calamari appetizer, seafood seemed like an afterthought at Chef ’s Table, an impression borne out by a whole grilled branzino. Mounted on a flower field of manicured herbs and vegetables, the bony, pulpy fish never stood a chance of living up to the spectacle.

Leave the spectacle work to pide, the hard-crust lacquered Turkish flatbread shaped into a shallow open canoe and filled with cheese and vegetables or meat, like a pizza minus the marinara. The pide serving board looked like the vice principal’s paddle, an imposing centerpiece filled end to end with pide in triangle slices with all the best qualities of a calzone, a stromboli, a pizza and a quesadilla put together.

Extending the pizza comparison a step further, Chef ’s Table rallies every last Sunday of the month to roll and bake lahmacun, a cracker-thin round flatbread covered with crumbles of spicy ground lamb, minced vegetables and herbs, and baked until the edges bubble and crackle. As I surveyed the pile of onions, parsley, tomato and lemons on the side, the server conveyed the lahmacun mantra: Fill it, fold it, roll it, eat it. Now say it with me: lak-mah-JOON.

For Ibrahim Karabiyik,

Chef ’s Table is a homecoming. And in the dining room with the wine I brought to this

BYOB cafe, surrounded by the art and artifacts of a life fully lived, I felt welcomed home.

Photos by Mike Sutter/Staff The excellent Adana kebab, clockwise from left, is presented with a house salad, lamb chops and Iskender kebab, another triumph.

Lamb chops, seared and lightly seasoned, are served with rice, salad and grilled vegetables.

The impressive pide, a Turkish flatbread, is baked with cheese and a sausage called sucuk.

The furniture, fixtures and decorations at the restaurant are all from Turkey.