Photograph: Feast/The Guardian
In a bumpy restaurant landscape, Green Lanes in Haringey, north London, with its glut of Turkish-Cypriot restaurants, cafes and baklava shops, remains pretty much a constant. Anyone who has ever passed through the capital seems to have a Green Lanes story involving plates of sweet sobiyet and kadayif with mint tea at Antepliler, or a night in Diyarbakir Kitchen featuring cold Efes beers and hot mangal grills. Places round here open for breakfast and close long after midnight, and operate seven days a week, too.
The Green Lanes scene may have opened up in recent years to include Kurdish and Bulgarian flavours, but its vibe remains largely unaltered: there are no frustrating tasting menus, no minuscule sharing plates, no pretension – and no chance of leaving hungry. At Gökyüzü, for instance, established in 1999, we went for an embarrassingly early dinner, imagining that we’d be eating pide and lahmacun in an empty restaurant with bored waiters and tumbleweed. But here’s the thing: Green Lanes is never really quiet. At 5.45pm on a Tuesday, Gökyüzü is in a reassuring state of bedlam: tables are full, and there are families everywhere – bring your babies, bring your mothers-in-law. Sharing platters of lamb shish, adana kebabs and chicken wings are in full swing, bowls of dressed leaves and baskets of fresh bread are being delivered to tables, while trayloads of yoghurty ayran are swept across the floor.
There are 10 staff waiting tables, and at least six more behind glass counters heaving with raw skewers, cold meze and desserts waiting to go. Gökyüzü, which began life here, now has five branches from Walthamstow to Kentish Town, and is perhaps one of the flashier set-ups in the Green Lanes brigade, with a cleaner, sparklier store front, semi-romantic booths, non-wonky tables and bright, fast service. But its main selling point is the sheer sense of largesse as you enter the joint. It is impossible to walk past those glass cabinets on the way to your seat and not spy something that you’d really like hurled on to a hot grill and brought to your table, which is already littered with small plates of tabbouleh, tarama and haydari. In my case, that thing was a skewer of fearsomely large, unshelled prawns coated in a marinade that I could see from some distance was a potent blend of garlic paste and parsley.
While I’m not entirely sure that Gökyüzü makes the crispest or most deftly seasoned lahmacun or the loveliest, silkiest baba ganoush in London, or even on Green Lanes, for that matter, there is a sense of theatre about the place, as well as a legacy about dining here that will make you overlook most flaws – especially if you’re dining with a crowd, because they’ll serve 12 of you without breaking sweat and won’t push to turn your table.
Prices seem to have shot up along Green Lanes recently, much as they have done in every corner of the British restaurant scene, so a rather diminutive chicken shish consisting of not very much meat and served with rice now costs £17.50, whereas the larger one that might satisfy a real appetite is £22.50. Cheap and cheerful this is not. A small mixed cold meze platter, which at one point in history was a typical complimentary offer along this stretch, is £16.50, which seems a lot for unmemorable hummus, a few scoops of strained yoghurt and some pleasant aubergine in tomato. Still, those enormous garlic prawns, fresh off the charcoal, were utterly glorious, as well as an absolute car crash to shell with any sense of decorum.
There’s a strong sense at Gökyüzü that they’ve seen it all, however. Staff flutter around like chipper survivors, retrieving lost babies, doling out doggy-bag boxes and helpfully adding an extra table when you’re eating with the likes of Charles, who always orders too much. “Let me help,” our server said, pushing another table close by to take the strain as a platter of lamb ribs and yet more Efes arrived, along with a second basket of lavash.
Where Gökyüzü surpasses itself, perhaps surprisingly, is in the desserts, which I ordered merely out of curiosity, then ate my words spoon by spoon in the form of one of the best kunefes I have ever encountered. It was wickedly good, featuring two layers of filo filled with crushed pistachios and served warm, drowned in syrup, encrusted with more pistachios and proffered with a scoop of gorgeous vanilla ice-cream. The sutlac, or rice pudding, is also extremely good; teeth-shatteringly sweet, perhaps, but worth every damned kilojoule.
Will I go back to Gökyüzü? Inevitably. It’s loud, just about always open and reliable for a last-minute large table. Even if it’s not quite changing the face of Turkish cooking, it is preserving the face of how it has looked, and it has made people in north London happy for decades. It’s not deconstructing the kebab and serving it with a playful yoghurt emulsion, but, let’s be honest, nobody needs that anyway.
Gökyüzü 26-28 Grand Parade, Green Lanes, London N4, 020-8211 8406. Open all week, 9am-2am. From about £30 a head, plus drinks and service
The food photographs show takeaway dishes from Gökyüzü, and may be served differently in the restaurant.
Grace Dent’s new book, Comfort Eating: What We Eat When No One Is Looking, is published in October by Guardian Faber at £20. To pre-order a copy for £16, go to guardianbookshop.com
