A fresh take on Turkish cuisine takes root in West Berkeley

Divan, a new Turkish restaurant in West Berkeley, delivers on some of the cuisine’s greatest hits: pides (“Turkish pizza”), pomegranates and pistachios, plus the passion for grilled meats and eggplant, Turkey’s most beloved vegetable. But, Divan does it in a sleek, contemporary, spacious room with a full bar, without the museum-like displays of ceramics and rugs other Turkish restaurants in the Bay Area often lean on for decor. Divan 1788 Fourth St., Berkeley; divanberkeley.com Hours: Dinner daily, 5 p.m. to 8:45 p.m.; lunch Monday-Friday 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m A live tree, pergola-like roofs above emerald-green banquettes and a roofed side patio, where plants spill from window boxes, evoke the sense of dining in a garden. (OK, an understated display of small Turkish ceramics adorns one wall niche). The high-end restaurant on West Berkeley’s Fourth Street Corridor, which added dinner in August after opening for lunch in late June, also has a modern menu to match its aesthetic, where the starters, breads, cocktails, desserts and lunch possess a much stronger Turkish influence than some dinner entrees. “We serve classic Turkish food with a Californian touch. Most Turkish restaurants around here focus on kebabs and classic Istanbul cooking. At Divan, we wanted a more modern, ingredient-driven take on Turkish and Anatolian cuisine, built around mezzes, which are ideal for sharing,”  says co-owner Serkan Sozer, who also co-owns Taksim, a high-end Turkish restaurant in San Francisco’s SoMa district. Co-owner Serhat Şahin is his former manager at Taksim, which leans more toward fusion Turkish, he notes. Divan’s chef, Cüneyt Karaçam, was sous chef at Meyhouse, a Turkish restaurant in Palo Alto, and cooked in luxury hotels in Dubai and London for six years before coming to California. The breads are standouts. Pide, a canoe-shaped puffy flatbread with a variety of toppings and pinched ends, is nicknamed “Turkish pizza.” Divan serves four types, three with melted kaşseri cheese, an aged semi-hard cow-sheep milk cheese, and I chose one topped with a generous amount of mushrooms, onions, kasseri and red pepper. Other pides are finished with kasseri and either spiced beef sausage (sucuklu pide) or arugula (peynirli pide), while a cheeseless one is topped by ground beef, tomato, bell peppers and spices alone. Sesame bread, baked fresh daily, is fluffy beneath a crunchy crust topped by sesame seeds. Labneh, a strained yogurt thicker and less liquid than Greek yogurt, appears in many dishes. Eggplant labneh was the smoky-tasting base for my dinner entrée, cökertme kebab, beef tenderloin strips marinated in paprika, oregano and olive oil, medium-rare and juicy, atop shoestring potatoes, scallions and sun-dried tomato. Mint labneh was underneath my starter, mücver, crisply fried zucchini balls filled with feta cheese. Garlic labneh is served with kopoglu, roasted eggplant with tomato sauce and pepper, and also with lahana sarma, white cabbage rolls stuffed with ground beef and rice. “Labneh and yogurt are everyday staples in Turkish home cooking,” Sozer notes. Urfa biber, a long red chile pepper with a smoky, tangy, fruity taste, is used in the beef tenderloin marinade, mücver and hummus. Kebabs don’t just mean meat on a skewer, he explained. “Kebab simply means grilled or roasted meat in Turkish. Only the skewered version is called shish kebab.” Thus, the familiar cubed meats-on-skewers are served only at lunch, in beef, chicken and vegetable-only versions, while vegetable-only kebabs are served at dinner. “At lunch, most guests are short on time and need to get back to work, so quick, tasty shish kebabs are a perfect fit. Dinner is more of a planned occasion with friends and family, so more labor-intensive main dishes are served.” On the long list of starters, the mezze trio features my all-time favorite, muhammara (pureed walnuts, roasted red bell peppers and pomegranate molasses), hummus and baba ganoush, served with sesame bread. Other starters are kuzu kaburga, slow-cooked lamb riblets with basil pesto and sumac onions, tossed with that tart, citrusy deep-red spice, shishito peppers with lemon oil, sesame seeds, tomato sauce and garlic yogurt topped by fried shoestring potatoes, and olives with Turkish-style pickled vegetables. Fermented in salt brine instead of vinegar, which lends a deeper, tangier flavor, they’re called turşu. The Turkish Breakfast for Two ($44) is a tour-de-force of scrambled eggs, dried apricots, mixed nuts, feta cheese, muhammara, honey and clotted cream, marinated olives, strawberry jam, tomato and cucumber salad and sesame bread. You can upgrade the eggs to menemem (scrambled eggs with tomatoes, green bell peppers and herbs, named after a town near Izmir, Turkey’s third-biggest city), cilbir (poached eggs over garlicky yogurt, topped with Aleppo pepper), or an omelet with wild mushrooms or sucuklu for $4. (It brought back fond memories of the generous breakfast spreads I ate in Cappadocia, watching hot-air balloons soar over the fairy-tale chimney rock formations from my cave-style inn a few years back.) Speaking of Cappadocia, that was the name of my cocktail, a pink libation of pomegranate juice, rose water, lychee, tequila and lime juice. All the creative cocktails at Divan possess evocative names. In the Bosphorus Smoke, smoke wafts from a sprig of lavender in the concoction of whiskey, citrus and egg white named for the strait Istanbul straddles separating Europe from Asia. The Grand Bazaar features gin, sorrel, melon, green apple, lemon and a shrub. The colors in Bodrum Sunset mimic sundown in that resort town on the Turquoise Coast, thanks to passionfruit-infused tequila, orange liqueur, citrus and spiced sugar. A martini features gin washed with olive oil. Bar manager Can Tura, who also works at SaltYard in Burlingame, created all the cocktails. Other entrées are Mediterranean branzino, moist and juicy beneath a crispy exterior, served with capers, mustard sauce, cauliflower puree and rainbow carrots, and lamb chops with a Turkish touch, thanks to pistachio chimichurri, adding Turkey’s beloved nut to the vinegar-based parsley-and-oregano sauce. Ottoman rice pilaf (studded with raisins, apricots, pine nuts, cinnamon, cloves and herbs), menemen, cilbir, Turkish-spiced French fries, sucuklu and mushroom omelets are sides at lunch. The most popular dessert is sutlac (rice pudding topped with a dark caramelized skin), and some Yelp commenters declared it the best they’ve ever had. Others include baklava (less sweet, with a stronger nutty flavor than is typical), poached pears and kunefe, a cheese pastry encased in layers of phyllo dough strands that’s baked and then soaked in lemon-flavored sweet syrup, served hot. Divan is named both for the imperial council where the Sultan’s ministers met in the Ottoman era, and the low, cushioned bench in a home’s main room, where family and guests gather to talk and share food. If finding Divan makes you feel as if you’re lost in the Grand Bazaar, it’s actually on Delaware Street despite the Fourth Street address, tucked away behind Peet’s, past the Vino! wine shop, in the terra-cotta-colored building once home to Pollara’s Pizza that still says Market Plaza. Related stories Rollicking Louisiana crawfish boils have landed in the East Bay. 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