Let me tell you a secret: I’ve mixed more drinks in Turkey than I’ve cooked hot dinners. I was trained as a bartender before I became a chef and, like most of my generation of Turkish hospitality students, I was inspired by the movie Cocktail (starring Tom Cruise and Bryan Brown). I found mixing drinks with ‘flair’ was a great way to get tips and to pick up chicks. Then I got serious and added cooking to my repertoire. When I opened my restaurant in the Sydney suburb of Balmain, one of my first customers was Bryan Brown, who lives round the corner.
These three flashy mixtures give a nod to traditional Turkish ingredients—rakı, pomegranate and figs—and two of them have Turkish puns in their names (the Nar in Narito means pomegranate, and the Inci in Incini means fig). But they were all created within a mile of Bryan Brown.
INGREDIENTS
1 heaped teaspoon Turkish coffee
15 ml (½ fl oz) Kahlua
30 ml (1 fl oz) brandy
10 ml (¼ fl oz) barrel-aged rakı
1 piece of pashmak (Persian fairy floss)
METHOD
1 Boil the Turkish coffee with 70 ml (2¼ fl oz) of water in a pot over medium heat. Strain three times through a tea strainer lined with muslin cloth to yield 15 ml (½ fl oz) of triple-strained Turkish coffee.
2 Half fill a cocktail shaker with ice. Add the kahlua, brandy, rakı and coffee. Shake vigorously for 1 minute. Strain into a long glass. Decorate with pashmak and serve.
Recipe and image from Anatolia by Somer Sivrioglu and David Dale (Murdoch Books) available now in all good bookstores and online.
