Reviews

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]asual and gracious, this redo of the old Lantern Inn restaurant impressed me with its delightful ambience and remarkable menu. After tasting dozens of dishes, I won’t even attempt to name my favorites. It’s one of the few restaurants where I know I can order anything and will adore it. Owner Tahir Gurz is Turkish, of course, but settled in New Jersey. His last restaurant was Baysis Shishkabob in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Following some friends to Houston, he opened Empire Turkish Grill just one year ago.

Fresh baked bread called pide arrives soon after you are seated. Not to be mistaken for pita, this bread was almost challah-like. It was cut into small chunks, the better to dip it into a za’atar dip. If that sounds Middle Eastern to you, it is, because the culinary influences in Turkey lean strongly to that area as well as Greece, Persia and even China. Za’atar is a mixture of oregano, thyme, sumac, sesame seeds and olive oil. I ordered a glass of wine from a small list that included some good California wines and some Turkish wines. With 17 cold appetizers on the menu, if you are with a group of people, I recommend the Combination Platter. For a reasonable price, you can select a nice variety. On my last visit, I had Lebni (a mixture of finely chopped and spicy veggies, with walnuts), (yogurt curd with garlic, dill and walnuts), Eggplant Sauté, Sautéed Spinach with onions and garlic, Babbaganus, Tabuli, and Hummus.

For hot appetizers, go for the Falafel (made with fava beans instead of garbanzo) and Turkish Cheese Cigars (Feta and parsley wrapped in filo).If you don’t want a variety of hot or cold appetizers, the Shepherd’s Salad is a must. Diced tomatoes, cucumber, parsley, onion and green pepper are mixed with olive oil and vinegar, then topped with shredded Feta cheese. This is one great salad! I also enjoy Empire’s Red Lentil Soup made with tomatoes, onions and spices.For your main course, I recommend the Mixed Grills. These platters are good for two or more. The Anatolian Grill includes chunks of marinated chicken breast, Shish Kabab (lamb cubes) and Turkish Gyro over a bed of rice. The plate also includes red cabbage, sliced onions, grilled tomato and pepper. I also like Filet Mignon Kabobs and the ground-meat rolls on skewers. For an extra special treat, try Stuffed Cabbage Leaves. They are very different from the Holishkes I’m used to, but they are terrific.Now, let’s talk dessert. Yes, they have Baklava. But, wait until you taste Tel Kadayifi, shredded wheat dipped in honey and topped with pistachios or Kazandibi, Turkey’s famous rolled caramelized vanilla milk pudding.

Dried Apricots stuffed with fresh cream and almonds are something else. Finally, an unbelievable rice pudding – it is heavily caramelized on top and sprinkled with crushed pistachios. Finish your meal with authentically sludgy Turkish coffee or the incredibly tasty Turkish tea.Empire Turkish also does full-service catering. Imagine surprising your guests with a Turkish dinner! Their menu is quite large, and I am enjoying working my way through it. They are located at 12448 Memorial, between Gessner and the Tollway, 713/827-7475. They are open every day for lunch and dinner.

 By ALISON COOK – Houston Chronicle – 02.11.2003  [dropcap] W[/dropcap]ho among us is strong enough to resist that end-of-the-year impulse to take stock, to sum up, to chronicle the highs and lows of the planetary cycle? Not me.

Trying to pick out the very best dishes from my 2002 Houston restaurant odyssey, I made a simple rule: no looking back at my notes or my archived columns. If I didn’t remember a dish vividly off the top of my head, it didn’t make the cut.

Here – in free-associative order that conveys nothing but the workings of an overstimulated brain – are my favorites… ….

Labni at the Empire Turkish Grill, 12448 Memorial, a newcomer as prim and polite as any Southern tearoom. The intense yogurt-cheese dip has a wonderfully tart edge, and the addition of walnuts and dill gives it style and substance. Fresh-baked Turkish bread makes a worthy vehicle.

By ALISON COOK – Houston Chronicle – 10.04.2002

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ack in the mists of time, if anyone had tried to tell me that one day a Turkish restaurant would occupy the digs of that fusty continental war horse the Lantern Inn, I would have been seriously skeptical.

That was then, and this is most assuredly now. The relevant stretch of Memorial Drive — a mile or two on either side of Beltway 8 — has moved way beyond white-bread country-clubbiness. Indika, the inventive neo-Indian restaurant, is here, and until recently the King & I, that estimable Thai kitchen, was part of the increasingly sophisticated mix. There’s Russian. There’s French. All bets are off.

Now comes the Empire Turkish Grill, which should give Memorial-area residents cause for celebration. Friendly, civilized, reasonably priced and open seven days a week, Empire is the sort of place that is a boon to any neighborhood.

And then there’s the cooking.

When I first tried Turkish food at Istanbul Grill in Rice Village, I was captivated. At Empire, the city’s second Turkish establishment, I continue to be smitten by the sunny Mediterranean flavors; by the sparkling array of vegetable salads, side dishes and dips; and by the simple grilled meats and plump rounds of sesame-quilted flatbread.

Empire has a different personality than the frenetic, Inner-Loopy, bohemian Istanbul Grill, with its close quarters and perpetual parking scrum in the postage-stamp lot.

The serene Empire registers as more genteel, with apricot-colored walls hung with a few quiet artifacts, linen-clad tables spaced wide apart. (Believe me, the Lantern Inn never looked so airy, or so good.) If you translated a Southern tearoom to the shores of the Bosporus, you’d have the gestalt of this relaxing room. Tucked away perpendicular to Memorial, it feels like a secret.

If there’s any justice, it won’t remain one. Empire is the rare restaurant that can make carnivores and vegetarians equally happy. The food doesn’t have quite the verve and funk of Istanbul Grill’s, but there’s a subtle finesse at work in this kitchen that offers its own rewards. The place could change your attitude toward Middle Eastern desserts. And while not an el-cheapo ethnic feed, Empire delivers a dining experience that feels special and classy at a price that is a relative bargain.

The must-order here is the platter, either small or large, of assorted cold appetizers, ingeniously served on an oyster plate. Each indentation gets a dab of something delicious: the subtlest, fluffiest eggplant dip with just a tinge of smoke, for instance, with a menu explanation that gives a face (“Papa Janus”) to the name baba ghanouj. Or a light, tingly eggplant salad threaded with dill. And since the Turks are eggplant maestros, maybe even a ratatouille-like eggplant sauté with a rich tomato tang and a caramelized bottom note.

Eggplant isn’t the half of the cold vegetable dishes. There are graceful versions of parsley-and-cracked-wheat tabbouleh and the sesame-and-chickpea dip hummus. There’s ezme, a particular favorite of mine for the way chopped walnuts add a meaty crunch to the mince of tomato, onion and faintly hot red pepper.

Best of all, perhaps, is the stunning yogurt spread called lebni, a rich, soft cheese that has been mixed with walnuts and dill. Scooped up with one of the Empire’s fresh, sturdy sesame loaves, the lebni makes a textbook case for the way the humblest ingredients can be transformed into something utterly luxurious.

(As a $3.75 luxury, the lebni is something you might want to take home and keep in your refrigerator; with a little flatbread, it makes a killer breakfast.)

Some of the cold appetizers here can only be had a la carte, such as the Turkish classic of honeydew melon and feta cheese, or the wonderfully slip-slidey stuffed baby eggplant called imam bayildi, with its suave cargo of garlicky tomato and onion. Stuffed grape leaves here are notable for their genuinely leafy quality — feel those ribs! — and a laid-back filling of pine nuts and rice barely sweetened with chopped raisins. Add a spritz from the ubiquitous lemon wedges so necessary to a Turkish meal, and you’re in business.

About those lemon wedges: Turkish cuisine is neither wildly nor complicatedly spicy. The tastes are clean and elemental; the few ingredients converse quietly rather than talking over one another like the characters in Gosford Park. Using lemon or yogurt to animate the flavors is part of the deal. You’re expected to customize. To that end, you also can employ one of the relish-y salads (ezme is ideal) or the toasty zaatar dip that comes on every table, a mixture of green herbs from the marjoram/thyme family along with olive oil, roasted sesame seeds and tart ground sumac. It’s habit-forming stuff.

One dish that springs to life with a bit of lebni or yogurt is a thin, flat, beautifully browned zucchini omelet called mucver. It’s a good choice for vegetarians or for a weekend brunch. I was less enamored of Empire’s cigar-shaped phyllo-pastry rolls stuffed with feta cheese, which seemed dryish and austere.

Among the entrees, the chargrilled lamb chops are spectacular. Four of them, cooked perfectly medium rare as requested, were the sort of thing tablemates fight over.

The various other kebab varieties struck me as perfectly nice, if less thrilling. The chicken was moist; the cubed lamb really tasted of lamb; the ground-beef adana kebab was pleasant enough. Only the doner kebab — shards of lamb sliced off a vertical spit — failed to measure up. The thin slices were too dry and (there’s that word again) austere to make much of an impression.

Next time — and there will definitely be a next time — I want to try one of the kebabs layered with yogurt and fried bread, which sounds altogether juicier and more promising.

Cabbage leaves stuffed with ground beef and rice, pillowy-soft and bathed in tomato broth, are straight-ahead comfort food. A stew of lamb and okra is an interesting novelty, not unlike a thin, tart, tomatoey gumbo.

But aside from the cold vegetable dishes and the lamb chops, it’s the Empire desserts that I dream about. Middle Eastern confections often are cloyingly sweet, but not here. Keskul, a shivery-light milk pudding flavored with almonds, seems innocent and sophisticated at once. Dried apricots stuffed with thickened cream and pine nuts taste ancient, almost primal. But it is the “bottom-of-the-cauldron” dessert, a roll of vanilla-scented pudding caramelized to a dark brown on its exterior surface, that wows: If you’re sick unto death of crème brûlée, try this.

At half the price.

And don’t blame me if you wake up at 3 a.m. mumbling, “I wish I had some kazandibi.”

Habit-forming: Empire Turkish Grill is cause for celebration

[dropcap]E[/dropcap]ast meets West meet Texas in fine fashion at this stylish and exotic popular Houston eatery & bar. Decor is Turkish elegant: individual dining booths wrapped in exotic fabrics and subdued colors. Cuisine is an innovative mix of Turkish and American southern grill. Your flame-broiled favorites — meats, seafood, poultry and vegetarian — enhanced with a flavorful exotic Turkish flare. Bar is a favorite after work and evening gathering place. Reservations.

Cuisine: Seafood, Steaks, Turkish
Ambiance: Elegant, Music, Romantic
Special Futures: Celebrities, Parking, Singles, Smoking
Entertainment: Live Music

Best New Restaurants

[dropcap]P[/dropcap]erhaps in subconscious defiance of the tattered economy and pervading sense of pessimism weave been living with for the past 14 months, Houston diners were gifted with some of the finest new restaurants in years. We wouldn’t call any of them conceptually daring (except perhaps Hugo’s), but the dozen listed below all are remarkable for several reasons, not the least being food. We traditionally single out the previous year’s best new restaurants in our February-March issue; this year, we also recall a dozen entities that foodies will miss most.

EMPIRE TURKISH GRILL , 12448 Memorial Dr. at Lantern Lane, 713-827-7475. It’s not decked out in the tent-draped, cushion-scattered kind of way that we were expected (given its previous incarnation as the Lantern Inn). Rather, Empire is a tidy, prim little spot where you’ll find Turkish-style pizza, kebabs of all kinds, salads, the yogurt cheese dip called labni, sweet desserts and gritty coffee. Like Alexander (above), the hands-on owner, Kamil Ramazanoglu makes all the difference.