Efes

Efes Mediterranean Grill is open seven days a week, from 11 a.m. to 12 a.m. This means that for 91 hours a week, you can eat some great food.

The restaurant itself is incredibly small — it seats approximately 24 people at a time — so at peak dinnertime hours, you might have to wait for a table. I arrived around 7:15 p.m. and had to wait 15 minutes or so to be seated, but one of my friends who arrived at 6:30 p.m. on another day had to wait about 45 minutes. The restaurant clears out rapidly after about 7:40 p.m. I would also suggest going to Efes with parties no larger than four, as the staff gets a bit confused with seating arrangements. Two is great, three is fine and four is doable, but with any more, a great seating fiasco will ensue.

The food, however, is definitely worth the wait. Having been on a Global Seminar in Turkey last summer, I like to think that I understand the essence of Turkish food, and in my estimation, Efes was almost spot-on. For appetizers, I ordered sigara boregi, a.k.a. feta cheese and parsley wrapped up in filo dough and deep-fried, while my friends ordered lentil soup and baba ganush. When it came time to order our entrees, I was so overwhelmed by the selection of wonderful Turkish noms that I just ordered the most well-known Turkish dish in America, chicken kebab. The meat was tender and juicy and tasted pretty Turkish, and it came with rice and an onion-heavy mini-salad. I ordered the smaller-sized dish, and it was plenty for me.

Of course, no meal is complete without dessert. My friends and I ordered baklava and sobiyet, a pastry similar to baklava but filled with cream and pistachio; both were delicious. Unfortunately, by the time we ordered, they had run out of sutlac, a rice pudding.

Now, the staff — they are absolutely incredible. Everyone who works there is Turkish, except for one Argentinean woman, and they all just want to hang out. The Argentinean woman told us that we should come back to the restaurant from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. during the weekdays so that her friend could teach us how to read fortunes from Turkish coffee beans. Now that’s good service.

Overall, Efes is a great place to go for dinner, but I’m also looking forward to just going there, getting some Turkish coffee and sutlac and straight chillin’ with my new friends on the staff.

Efes

235B Nassau St.