Turkish coffee

I went out to dinner the other night, walking the 50 yards from my place to the closer of two Persian restaurants at the corner of Wolfe & El Camino Real.

The meal itself was not what I would call really special—for the prices they’re charging I’d have expected more than paper placemats and napkins; the “rack of lamb in the Persian style” was such that apparently “the Persian style” means “grilled without any herbs or marinades”; and the bread had all the flavor and much of the consistency of Saltine crackers.

I finished off with a Turkish coffee, which tasted surprisingly weak (considering that this style of java is a couple ounces of water to a couple of heaping teaspoons of fresh beans pounded to a powder, with sugar pre-added) and wasn’t nearly as hot as it ought to have been. But it got me thinking about Turkish coffee in my life.

My introduction to it was at age 19, when my friend Gretchen and I took the Illinois Central up to Chicago from her home in Champaign. We spent the night at some hotel before I had to fly back to LA and head off to UCLA. I didn’t know from any foreign food other than Chinese or Mexican, but Gretchen was dead set on Middle Eastern, and; we somehow found a place where she could get lahmajoun.

The thing I recall about that meal was the Turkish coffee—thick, hot and sweet. I probably drank all the sludge, since my upbringing was such that you don’t leave any food or drink on the table when you leave.

My next recollection of this beverage came from the Armenian family that lived behind our house on the north side of Pasadena during my last year at college (not UCLA).

(The city has long had a sizeable Armenian community—my pediatrician was Dr. Hovsepian, & there’s been an Armenian Orthodox church on Colorado boulevard for decades. In addition to healers and holy folk, Pasadena was also a hotbed of anti-Turkish activism by Armenians. Every few years there’d be some incident involving the Turkish consulate in LA that was traceable back to Pasadena, & one night in the early 80s some minor consular official’s VW bug was firebombed with him in it a couple of blocks from the house where I was living. I have no idea what he was doing in that part of town, which at the time was described as a “neighborhood in transition”; but it was definitely not salubrious for him.)

Anyhow, our neighbors were refugees from the civil war in Lebanon. There was a mother, a grandfather and a daughter somewhere in her 20s. We had two distinct backyard areas, a kind of not-quite-landscaped garden next to the house and then a wilderness that also had a couple of rows of grape vines. I was working back there one day trying to get a vegetable garden going when the daughter popped her head over the fence and asked if they could collect some of our grape leaves. I said sure and we started up an acquaintance. (My dad ended up running several vines across the fence so they wouldn’t have to walk around the block to get them in the future.)

They invited me over for coffee, which was the Turkish kind. And the daughter read my fortune by having me swirl the sludge detritus around the cup and upturn it onto the saucer. I don’t recall what the fortune was. I was just kind of surprised that you could read it in coffee grounds as well as tea leaves.

And then when I was living in Virginia Beach, one of our friends knew of a Mediterranean restaurant in a strip mall in Princess Anne—basically a hole-in-the-wall, run by a Greek emigrant then in his 50s or 60s. Jay had struck up a friendship with this guy, so we got personal attention when we went in.

There was both Greek coffee and Turkish coffee on the menu, exactly the same price. I asked what the difference was and the owner grinned. None, it seems. Exactly the same product: powdered beans, sugar, hot water, no filtering. Having them both just gave the menu variety.

And maybe it allowed Turks and Greeks both to finish off their meal with a coffee without aiding and comforting the enemy.

The last time I had Turkish coffee was in Istanbul, in 2000, so it seems I was overdue for it. I’ll have to see if there are other places in the area where I can find it.