Having not eaten a great deal of bread in the past week, tonight's meal at Angel Mangal Ocakbasi presented a great opportunity to load some carbs in a manner which I suspect would not have pleased Dr Atkins. I'm not quite sure why but the quality of Turkish food in London is not always given the full recognition it deserves and AMO is an excellent example of the best kind of Turkish restaurant in London: great grills, fantastic bread, super mezze and salads, and very reasonable prices. In the past I had always favoured Mangal II in Dalston but decided to try AMO on the recommendation of Dos Hermanos (http://majbros.blogspot.com/). In terms of the style of restaurant and food, the two are very similar and of an equally high standard. Walking back down Upper St the weird thing was that were stacks of mediocre restaurants packed to the gunnells, whilst AMO was only half-full whilst we were there. It's close to Los Desperados, formerly Granita of Blair/Brown fame, where two Russians dressed as cowboys were trying to lure the punters in...
We began with huge, puffed sesame bread and olives, followed by starters of a yoghurt and garlic dip and some cheese and dill sambosek. The latter dishes came with another, softer bread, several kilos of which are currently lining my stomach. For mains we had the vegetarian pide ('Turkish pizza') and some kind of kofte (I wasn't paying much attention). All the dishes were super-fresh and tasty and the whole lot, with a few soft drinks, came to £25 before a tip. More or less the only downside about the place is that they don't take cards, and that the nearest cash point is quite some distance away: probably only 500m, but it felt like 5km with that bread beginning to settle...
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