Review: At Sofra Restaurant & Bakery, the road to Istanbul begins in Depew

Ending Turkish cuisine drought, owners of Rochester’s As Evi open Buffalo beachhead, complete with a boffo bakery case

Beyti kebab, spicy ground beef, grilled, wrapped in lavash, grilled more, and sauced, served with yogurt and fresh chile, at Sofra.

Time to learn Turkish, Buffalo eaters.

Western New Yorkers have had little reason to, lately. One Turkish spot opened on Elmwood Avenue in 2003, closing 18 months later. Two months in 2016 for a Tonawanda outfit.

I did the math. In this millennium, Buffalo’s had a Turkish restaurant 6 percent of the time.

(Editor’s note: This email has a lot of images, so you might have to click “See More” to get the rest of the story.)

In 2021, I finally noticed As Evi, in Rochester. Now the money once spent on gas and tolls can go towards my continuing education in Turkish cuisine at Sofra Restaurant and Bakery. With As Evi opening a Buffalo terminal just a mile from the Buffalo Niagara International Airport, all I want now is a pair of those fluorescent direction-giving batons to wave like searchlights, guiding hungry folks in to disembark.

So here’s my Turkish 101.

Istanbul is a city with foundations nearly three millennia deep. The Byzantines founded an empire there, leaving behind breathtaking architecture, and a reputation for making things overly complicated.

Turkish cooking is straightforward, if not exactly simple. Sofra offers a best-hits lineup that will probably expand as the restaurant staff grows.

Made-to-order breads, stuffed, topped, smothered, and covered, are at the heart of Turkish restaurant cuisine, along with a fiery grill. Housemade yogurt is another main ingredient, as sauce, ingredient, or straight-up side, for scooping and mixing into other custom configurations.

Karadeniz yagli is a specialty of the Karadeniz region, near the Black Sea.

Iskander kebab ($19.99) starts with old bread, toasted, for the base. Layer on shaved beef doner meat, butter, and tomato sauce, all tightened up with a slide under the salamander. Add a generous dollop of yogurt on the side, and one of the most genius dishes in the world has landed in Buffalo.

Consider manti ($19.99), housemade grape-sized beef dumplings lavished with garlic yogurt, chile, chile oil, and herbs. Fresh housemade bread speckled with nigella and sesame seeds arrives with it, as Turkish is a dunking-intensive cuisine.

How will Turkish food play in Buffalo?

This time, I had help answering the question: a reader who won the monthly Galarneau Invites You to Dinner drawing. (Each month a paid subscriber, chosen at random, gets a dinner invite from me, for a restaurant, or cooking at their place. Participation in a Four Bites story is optional.)

Aaron Lowinger, winner of the paid-subscriber-only dinner invite for March, brought Becky Moda-Lowinger, his wife, and son Isaac Lowinger.

Lowinger, who enjoyed Turkish street food in Germany, found Sofra’s offerings “a worthy representation of a cuisine that straddles European and Middle Eastern influences and flavors.”

Beyti kebab ($19.99) was his favorite – and the top vote for can’t-miss dish on the table. It’s a mildly spicy beef kebab that’s grilled, wrapped in fresh lavash just thicker than a flour tortilla, then grilled to a finish, sliced, and sauced. Served with – wait for it – yogurt.

Back in Buffalo between sessions of archeological work in Turkey, Ashley Cercone brought the freshest recollections of authentic Turkish cooking to our table.

“While the owners of Sofra are originally from the Karadeniz, or Black Sea region, Sofra boasts a range of Turkish cuisine for customers to try,” Cercone said. “They offer a sofra, or dining table, worth of options, which you would typically see on menus in Istanbul or Ankara.”

Cercone demonstrated the right way to eat lahmancun (3/$17.33), beef-and-pepper topped fresh bread. First, apply salad fixings, including sumac-sprinkled shaved onions. Squeeze on a lemon wedge, fold, and eat.

We learned about the bready boats of pide, open-topped and thinner-skinned than calzones, but vessels built with the same intent: to deliver cheese, meat, vegetables, and eggs to hungry people in handy bread casings.

Karisik means “mix,” and karisik pide ($18.99) is a straight-outta-Ankara meat-lover’s combo: pastrami, sausage, ground beef, and kashar cheese.

Kebabs and bread you’d expect in a Turkish restaurant. The bakery case with shelves of patisserie-ish work was a pleasant surprise. From a tactical standpoint, a fully elaborated sweets mall-behind-glass offers significant leverage to convince just about any breathing human being to give Sofra a chance.

Service is decidedly leisurely, so Sofra is not a restaurant for people in a hurry. If you need snappy service, pick another place. A month old, Sofra is under way, but running with a minimal crew. Ordering ahead would be the move if you’re on the go.

Lebneh, drained yogurt with fresh dill and mint, chile, olive oil, and housemade bread, at Sofra.

We arrived at 6 p.m. on a Saturday night during Ramadan. While we ate, a staffer went table to table distributing paper receipts for meals people had ordered for iftar, observant Islam’s first meal of the day.

Then platters of pide and manti and boti kakab and chicken yogurtlu started coming out in twos and threes, arranged to match the receipts.

As the hour of iftar arrived, families walked in, chose drinks from the cooler, and sat down to eat with little or no delay. Watching the procedure was like seeing drive-through dining speed applied to the full pleasure of a sit-down meal.

Chocolate caramel torte with chestnut, Sofra

“After spending the last 10 years traveling back and forth from Turkey, I can say that Sofra offers an authentic feel and taste,” Cercone said. “Even though the building was formerly home to a Chinese restaurant, Sofra truly transports you to a lokanta somewhere in Turkey.”

Imagine what Sofra can do for your family, especially with that bakery abbondanza to quell naysayers. There’s a lot to learn at Sofra, and more to come.

The road to Istanbul begins in Depew.