Pide: Traditional Turkish Comfort Food

Along the streets of Istanbul you will see the occasional fast food establishment. But for the most part, Turkish people still prefer homemade food. Then again, Turkish food is so richly diverse, combining the best elements of Mediterranean, Balkan, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Armenian cuisines, there’s no reason to settle for a tasteless, mass-produced burger when you can have something just as simple to eat, but much more delicious. 

Pide is a good example of this. These traditional flatbread pizzas are boat-shaped and topped with cheese and meat and vegetables in almost limitless combinations and cooked in a very hot clay or stone oven. 

At Sultan Saray, Pide is a true comfort food, something to slice and share with friends and family. It can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. 

Design Your Own Pide

For children,  who can be infamously picky, cheese is probably the easiest choice. This is made with three types of cheese: Mozzarella, white cheese and Kashkaval.

From there you can add spinach or crumbled, spiced lamb, or sujuc, which is a dry and spicy sausage made from ground beef. 

The crust of our Pide is a soft and chewy flatbread, sprinkled with sesame seeds.

Before a recent discover, the world’s oldest bread –9100 years old!– had been located at an ancient site in Turkey. Though archaeologists recently found a pita-like flatbread in Jordan that was over 14,000 years old.

Half and Half

Pide can be made cheese on one side and Zaatar or meat or chicken on the other. If you haven’t already, try Muhammara, a red pepper paste from Aleppo, Syria that complements the other toppings so well.

Don’t let the red pepper scare you, The Muhammara is more smokey and savory than it is spicy. 

Sultan Saray serves Pide with a plate of fresh mint, cucumber, tomatoes and olives. Unless you order the desert Pide, which is topped with chocolate, bananas, and honey. 

Accompany your choice of this Turkish pizza with a fresh watermelon juice or hot tea. You can’t go wrong with any of the customer favorites at Sultan Saray.

The Royal Breakfast

The Royal Breakfast - A Decadent Spread
“The Cream and Honeycomb is my absolute favorite!” ~ Amal K.

The way you treat breakfast sets the tone for the day. 

Some will pour coffee into a take-away cup and tear open a package of something at a stoplight on their drive to a meeting that started two minutes ago. But this suggests a day of chaos, of having a full day with not enough time for anything that matters. You might find yourself constantly hungry for something you never get to taste. Remember: how you spend your days is how you spend your life.

For the Turkish people, breakfast is more than the most important meal of the day. It is a ritual that happens every day of the week—not just on weekends—and sets the tempo for everything that comes next. We suspect this is why breakfast is our most popular meal at Sultan Saray.  The restaurant is full of the people who take breakfast seriously. 

Even our most simple dish has taken the time and attention to include the best ingredients. Even the most simple dish is a good start to a good day. 

In the mood for something simple? Something light to eat while scrolling through Instagram or chatting with a friend at the outdoor patio? Try freshly baked Simit (traditional Turkish bread sprinkled with sesame seeds) and a Cappuccino.  

The Royal Breakfast – Everything You Love

The Royal Breakfast, however, is what you order when you are in the mood for a little bit of everything, an exploration of the full spectrum of flavour, from the sweetness of cream and honeycomb to the satisfying saltiness of black olives. 

This decadent spread is what you order when you are hungry for breakfast, when you want to celebrate the experience of a sunny day in Dubai with a friend or two.  It’s the kind of breakfast you order when you want a little bit of everything but not too much of anything. It is the delicate balance of everything you’ve ever tasted all at one table. 

A Little Savory

The cheese selection is a good example of this. A proper Turkish breakfast involves more than one kind of cheese to slice and eat alone or soft to spread on one of several kinds of bread. Beyond the cheese platter the Royal Breakfast includes halloumi cheese baked in milk, cream cheese to spread on bread, and mild red peppers stuffed with cheese. 

Eggs are served two ways: baked with Sujuk, a dry, spicy sausage, and eggs baked in a tangy tomato and cheese sauce.  Both go well with any choice of bread in the bread basket. 

A Little Sweet

For those looking for something sweet, choose from three different types of jam—sour cherry and apricot are traditional—chocolate spread or lotus spread, or dip a fresh strawberry into some cream cheese. The fresh cream in a pool honey is the most decadently sweet topping for any warm bread. That plate usually disappears first. 

The Freshest Ingredients

Move on to more healthy options that include fresh tomato and cucumber slices, hazelnuts, dried apricots, and figs. Once you have gotten this far in the breakfast you realise there’s even more to taste. Dip some warm bread into olive oil and then into a bowl of Zaatar spice.  Zaatar is also delicious mixed with cream cheese and spread onto, well, anything. 

This full landscape of flavour and texture comes with fresh orange juice and Turkish tea. But if you’ve come this far, and you believe as we do that breakfast can set the tone for the rest of the day, you may as well order a Cappuccino while you are at it. Because you want this day to be at least a little bit of everything you love. 

You can order the Royal Breakfast anytime from 8 am to 1 pm.

To book a table call our Dubai restaurant at 600 53 22 70. To join us in Ajman call +971 6 740 5040

جميع الحقوق محفوطة. مطعم سلطان سراي التركي في دبي وعجمان