I was in London for less than 48 hours for work but since I was there I wanted to squeeze in some social time and take advantage of my time there. I hadn't seen my friend Ingrid in quite some time so it was quite lovely catching up with her while I was there. I don't really have a great sense of London geography but apparently I was on one side of town and she was on another, so we met in a place in the middle at Notting Hill (yes, that Notting Hill) for a tasty Turkish meal.
Despite trying to be open minded about different cultures, I find the food in London to be really quite bad - it's so shocking given how international and urban the city is but in all the years that I've been there, I have yet to find another city with less culinary appeal than London. Luckily, Lokkanta stepped it up a notch. Ingrid found it on TripAdvisor and while it's definitely nothing fancy (it could double as sharma take out place in NYC but it does have a few tables inside), the food is quite flavorful and good. They had a nice variety of hummus, falafel dishes, and grilled meat plates. I started with the soup of the day (lentil soup) and got the grilled lamb dish (12 GBP) for my main. I was prepared for the lentil soup to be just ok but I was starving which is why I ordered it and it was actually quite delicious. It had a tomato base which was surprising but brought some good acidity and flavor to it. It almost seemed more like a tomato barely soup than lentil - in any case, it was simple but well balanced soup that was quite enjoyable. The grilled plate had tender pieces of lamb grilled over the BBQ topped with a tomato based yogurt sauce and drizzled with butter. (I'm sensing a trend with all the tomato bases here). It was a fairly large portion and combined with the bread, it was quite filling. The sauce had a bit of an Indian feel to it with the buttery tomato yogurt base but it was great to sop it all up with lots of warm pita bread and lamb. My only complaint was there was too much sauce on the plate - the dish was practically swimming in it and no matter how much bread or lamb I used to soak it up, it was just all over the place.
Despite it not being a real fancy sit-down place, it actually was the perfect set-up for us because it was super casual and they let us sit there for 2+ hours talking without really bothering us. While I've always had a strong preference for ethnic food, my experience this time in London proves that if you really want to have any sort of digestible meal in England, stick with the Indian/Middle Eastern track as it'll have the most flavor of anything you'll have there. Total bill: 15.75 GBP
Photo Credit: Yelp
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