Levante Restaurant, 11 Lewis Grove, London SE13 6BG

Levante Restaurant: Come for the specials, stay for the turnip juice

There’s always one, isn’t there? Built like a scotch egg impaled on a thumb, the podgy remnants of the EDL who feel no irony in wedging themselves into a corner of mangal’s and curry houses, as if these places have earned their exception. Loud, crass and clearly out of their depth – their selective xenophobia appeased only by food they understand or dangling of a transactional sex carrot via mail order relationships. One of these orcs has bumbled into to the otherwise serene Levante Restaurant in Lewisham, even managing to convince a beautiful Latina woman to join him.

She sits across from this scalded bollock, alternating between laughing at whatever he manages to cobble together with the two halves of the same brain cell and staring into the middle distance. Now he’s insisting on the ‘spicy turnip juice’ dismissing the waiter’s doubtful expression cos it’ll be “wurf a laff down ‘spoons la’ur”. I hate him.

At least this is what I assume people snarl to themselves every time they see me in public with The Editor.

But it also doesn’t help that, owing to my Viking heritage, tearing at lumps of animal and bread gnarled with char from open flame, are thoughts that come even more intrusively than my position in a shield wall. Round the corner from our flat, Levante Restaurant is a sure thing – a Turkish and Mediterranean hybrid beast, tucked down an artery of Lewisham High Street, it’s the classic mullet configuration: business in the front featuring an array of skewered meat with a doner carousel all backlit with flames, through to a relatively cavernous party of a dining space in the back.

Heavily nostalgic for someone who drank the pickle juice ahead of finishing the jar

Delivery drivers mill around with punters and staff taking a seat outside and chatting, whilst flood defences of orders are stacked on the counter glass before giving the green light. Seldom packed but never empty, Levante seems to be the same answer for various minds; the lady behind us putting her lavash to work through her mezze between sips of tea. The two old boys trying to figure out where to put their frosty pints as their platter arrives; the fat still dancing on the chops. The next table over is a young couple mirroring their daughter’s choice of beef burger and chips. In the opposite corner, four chaps sit coordinate their reaches, grabbing a bit of everything whilst disparaging their college.

Levante’s menu is laced with an endearing swagger. The ‘Sultan Kebab’ of marinated minced lamb mixed with pistachios and wrapped in a tortilla with special sauce and butter for example, promises that “You will feel like a sultan”. Almost putting a hand on your thigh, Levante confide that their sucuk izgara is “Far more than the sausages you know” and, although thigh-slappingly salty, it’s an otherwise fine example.

The humus winks with an almost Carlsberg-like legal loophole of “Must be the best in town!”. This turns out to a be a bit of a stretch as you might imagine, with a fairly standard-issue iteration in terms its rough-hewn texture but perked-up with a fistful of garlic and a fat flick of sumac. Batons of ramazan pide studded with black and white sesame seed arrive by the basket along with a little pot of ezme — the lingering bitterness of blended tomato and red pepper seeds made moreish in chasing its initial sweetness.

Vignetted with char, the lahmacun is laden with lamb, catching the heat in all the right places and an ideal chance to Jackson Pollock with ezme. “If you like lamb kebab, you will love iskender” Levante posits, The Editor wasting no time in ordering it, confident in its similarity to a dish she adored whilst living in Oman. Crispy shreds of doner meat are bound in a silt laden with tomato puree, mounded on crispy rice and jumbled with chunks of buttery bread. Flanked with a splodge of yoghurt, imagine a riff on a deconstructed lasagne that’s dramatically less annoying than my description.

But all of this, dear reader, is mere foreplay. Probably owing to the rife gaslighting of the Small Plates Racket, when something is suggested “for two” I call bullshit. You know the deal — it actually means one normal portion circa 2012 yet because it comes with two saucers, you’re made to feel like a degenerate. Levante doesn’t entertain such things.

That, Willis, is what I’m talking about

Skirting on my favourite portion size of ‘nearing absurd but doable’, the ‘Levante Special for Two’ groans with smoked-wreathed proteins heaped over bulgur pilaf and slighty overdone white rice. Crisply blistered chicken wings, chicken Adana as mottled with parsley as it is with char whilst the lamb Adana is a close-knit blend, plumped with onion. Gnarled burnt end-like chunks of lamb and chicken shish sandbag the edge of the plate, the whole lot topped off with burnished lamb chops, the fat rendered to the point where it becomes a condiment unto itself. And, for those of you wanting to know — the chips are worth the punt, too.

Which is just as well because the lamb ribs come mounted on a generous thatch of them. Righteously singed and flecked with za’atar, they’re the grade of rib that are so viscerally satisfying, you regress into grunts and ham-fisted gestures.

Tear and share

Them Changes

Furnished with tea and two baklava, it’s the final act. I often find baklava like Thundercat’s effects choices; a syrupy womp teetering on overdoing it — designed to appeal to The Heads and highlight my ignorance in ‘not getting it’. Well again, Levante doesn’t care for this, even if I have just fabricated the scenario. Crisp yet oozing still, surrounded in a rubble of pistachio, their baklava doesn’t cloy and is toasty with caramelised lamination. Cut with black tea, it’s a clean end to a 28 napkin affair and yet another joint in my home borough I’m blessed to have in my back pocket.