Signature Dish: Ada Patisserie

A brief note about Signature Dish.  Kalkan has its fair share of restaurants, and each year many new restaurants pop up beside the classics that remain season after season.  To create our Signature Dish posts, we have partnered with restaurants in Kalkan to discover not only what their signature dish is, but also how the dish is prepared, where ingredients are sourced, and a bit of the chef’s and/or owner’s philosophy on food, cooking, and the restaurant experience.  Signature Dish will be a recurring feature on Turquoise Collected.

Your chef: Nuray (the first female chef to be featured on Turquoise Collected!)

This is Nuray's first season working in Ada's kitchen and she was kind enough to let us watch her whip up Ada's signature dish: Turkish Breakfast.


This whole concept of <insert country name here> Breakfast is still relatively new to me.  There is no "American Breakfast" like there is English Breakfast or Irish Breakfast.  And while I'm still trying to get my head wrapped around those (I just don't think the American palette was built to enjoy black pudding...), after watching Nuray prepare Turkish Breakfast (and then devouring it hot from the kitchen), I can say I've found a country whose breakfast I like in all its parts.


As with English and Irish Breakfasts, Turkish Breakfast varies from place to place and region to region.  Ada's typical Turkish Breakfast features the following items:

A little behind the scenes action of Nuray plating the (cherry, strawberry, and aubergine!) jam.

A note about the fruit and veg: if you go to Ada for Turkish Breakfast in March, you may not end up with the same exact fruit and veg you get in, say, July.  The reason?  Ada only serves seasonal fruit and vegetables - sourced from Kinik where the family of Ada's owner, Cihan (pronounced Gee-han) owns 10,000 square meters of greenhouses.  So, if you want fresh-squeezed orange and pomegranate juice - which, believe me, you do - you have to go in March.


Breakfast also features bread, including simits baked on the premises (post to come!).

This is all served alongside the main attraction - the eggs.

That's eggs, fried in butter and oil, with a type of Turkish sausage called sucuk (pronounced soo-jook).  




We have been trying for months and months, in two different countries, on two different continents, to recreate this dish, but without the Turkish sucuk, it just never comes out exactly right.  The sucuk has a slightly spicy flavor, and it also doesn't seem to release as much fat as the American and English sausages we've tested in our faux-Turkish Breakfasts.  Despite all of that though, we keep trying, because even without the exact flavors, the general concept of a Turkish Breakfast makes for yummy eating, day or night.


Ada Patisserie is located on the Kalamar road and, along with Turkish Breakfast, serves sandwiches and salads, coffees and teas, and tons of freshly baked (on the premises) baked goods.