Dining Out 015: Petek
Lunch in Finsbury Park.
When you have:
– arrived at the pub at about 2PM;
– watched an England match at 5;
– left said match as it goes to extra time in order to go to watch Robbie Williams at Hyde Park;
– while also attempting to see England take penalties on strangers’ phones upon entry;
– then just randomly bumped into John Barnes;
– before getting into the crowd just in time to see Robbie say he doesn’t actually know the words to “Come Undone”;
– and ultimately born witness to what is, let’s face it, the reasonably hallucinatory sight of Danny Dyer performing a word-perfect rendition of Blur’s “Parklife” on-stage, alongside a load of Beefeaters and Robbie in a bedazzled Adidas trackie top
…it does sort of go without saying that you will be quite hungover the next day.
There is something sort of amazing about eating on a hangover. As long as you’re not like, head-in-the-bog bad, the general rule is that eating will make you feel loads better, which, in turn, makes “hungover” probably the second-most pleasurable state to eat in (the first, of course is: “in Spain or Italy”).
On this particular occasion, I was feeling a bit sorry for myself (understandably, you will agree), and after eventually getting out of bed at 4PM (four), I had one specific thing on the brain: Turkish food. This is largely because I’m on the Pretending I Am On Holiday bent even more now that the weather is doing whatever the fuck it is doing* – I truly will have a summer of some kind by force – but also because there is very little you can eat that is as fundamentally satisfying as the earthy depth of adana, blackened on the grill, and served on a long, rectangular plate, with flat, crisp chips, dusted in herbs.
Enter: Petek on Stroud Green Road. It’s a fairly big but still cosy-feeling spot where the seats against the wall are cushioned in velvet, the walls are lined with trinkets and gilded frames and mirrors, and the clientele is genuinely varied. Around us there were families with kids – all of whom were happily chomping on bread and meat from the bone, which always makes me really laugh – as well as groups of older friends, a mum and daughter next to us, and a young couple outside, smoking in between courses (a Pretending You Are On Holiday-approved activity).
I’ve written about it before (in fact to be honest, let’s face it, I never stop going on about it) but I do get frustrated with places that christen themselves “neighbourhood restaurants” despite a) catering only to the Lime Bike crowd and b) not actually earning that title whatsoever, having just rocked up in the area. A quick Google tells me that Petek, however, has been in its spot since 2005, and it felt like a lived-in place that most people there had been to many times. I really liked that about it.
Pretty soon after we sat down, olives and fresh chilli sauce and very recently grilled flatbread was delivered to the table, and honestly I’d forgotten how much I like it when that happens. Because of course I would love all of those things, without having to ask for them. Those things, in fact, are exactly what I want. I could – amid my hangover – have cried because I wanted them all so much, and here they were in front of me, anticipated for me. Europeans of all stripes are great at this, largely because they just don’t hold truck with any flavour of especial English pickiness. It’s just like: the olives are good, so have the olives.
And if you want specifics on those olives, they were fat and black and swimming in oregano-heavy oil, the chilli was properly radge (complimentary), and the bread had that perfect cushiony in the middle, crisp on the outside thing going on, where you’re medically unable to stop “filling up on bread”, even though you are well aware that that is what you are doing.
When it came to ordering, there was a great value ‘two courses for £18.95 deal’ on offer, even on a Sunday, whereby you could get a dip-style starter, plus a meat main course, served with salad and rice (which we swapped for chips due to reasons of hangover), for that pretty good price**. We went with humus, cacik, adana, and a few beers (Efes, obviously), plus an extra round of bread, and ended up paying £30 a head in the end, which felt more than worth it.
The humus was thick and had more texture than I generally look for – though I liked that it came dressed with pomegranate seeds for a little bit of sweetness and actual grit – but the cacik was the real revelation. I am a cacik/tzatziki/anything with yoghurt-botherer at the best of times, but I find that a lot of the time, the garlic can overpower the rest of the ingredients, which are much milder. Not so here – the balance was really well-observed, and when the adana arrived, it was an ideal accompaniment.
Speaking of that adana: firstly, it was huge, so in terms of quantity, the value for money was legit. And secondly, taste and texture-wise, it was also bang on. The grilling was brilliant – there was a little bit of resistance on the outside as I cut into the meat, though it wasn’t dried out on the inside – and I liked the pairing of it with your standard, balsamic-y restaurant salad, which, a lot of the time, is, again, actually exactly what I want.
We were given a really long time to eat, which I appreciated, and nothing felt rushed. It was leisurely, the way a Sunday meal should be. When we came to pay, two cute little chunks of sticky, rosy Turkish Delight arrived at the table with the bill, and as I bit into one of them, the sun came back out for a bit, and streamed through the windows of Petek, right onto my face. “I have,” I thought, “had worse hangovers.”
* rendering Dining Out’s most recent post for paid subs – a list of places where I like to eat al fresco – a bit pointless, but hey, maybe you’ll find it useful for the one sunny weekend in August or something!
** set menu fans, take note.
I paid for this visit.
Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday. Click below to see paid and free subscription options, and thanks very much for reading.