Tike max – high quality Turkish action

Please be aware that, much to my chagrin, Tike has gone tits up. A real shame, it was a top destination for an affordable, quality and interesting meal.

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Just a few doors away from Fenchurch Street station (great building) there is Tike (pronounced tee-kay) a properly cool and properly good purveyor of Turkish food. Given the quality and how affordable the food was we found ourselves slightly surprised it wasn’t throbbingly busy.

The dining room itself was modern and reasonably stylish, they didn’t need to have the background music pumping quite so loudly, though. The poor maitre d’ was circling constantly, seemingly so worried about his lack of clients he felt the need to ask if everything was alright when we had only bread on the table.

The bread was excellent. Little pillows of pita bread which had inflated in the heat of the oven, fresh and tasty.

We had three little plates to start. Lachmajun was a wonderfully crisp piece of bread with spiced meat with lemon to squeeze on top. We really enjoyed this until Daniel used the offered hot ground chilli powder a tad too liberally and blew his head off with every bite. Miutebel was warm aubergine dip with roasted pistachio nuts on top. This had good, fresh flavours and plenty of richness. Very enjoyable, we kept filling the parcels of pita bread with this. Finally a less successful little plate. Ichli kiofte were little ground wheat wrapped balls of minced beef. They were just a touch anonymous.

Our main courses were anything but anonymous, indeed I’d go as far as saying they were brilliant reconstructions of fast food dishes. My beyti kebab was excellent meat wrapped up in crispy bread and sliced into elegant little strips served with grilled chillies (which are sometimes frighteningly hot) and tomatoes. This dish was a revelation for me: Turkish food with style, panache and really good ingredients. Tasted fantastic, and the transition of textures between the cripsy bread and the tasty meat was very satisfying.

Daniel chose a marinated lamb shish kebab and again it was presented with flair. There were square sheets of flatbread above and below perfectly cooked pieces of really quite tasty lamb: lamb tucked up under the sheets in bed. It served on the taste-front and was quite amusing, but we both agreed my selection was best.

We had a couple of desserts, which didn’t surprise us with how tooth-aching sweet they were, and left feeling full and happy. This has to be one of the best semi-fast food dining establishments in The City, the food can live up to its slight degree of pretention and it will not break the bank.

Contact: Tike Restaurant, 5 Fenchurch Place, EC3M 4AJ Telephone: 020 7702 9965