Mutlu Lokantası

Mutlu Lokantası — the 'Happy Restaurant' — is one of the long-standing family-run eateries in central Ankara that uphold the old tradition of the esnaf lokantası, the 'tradesmen's restaurant' where clerks, drivers, shopkeepers, and students have for decades found a reliable, affordable lunch cooked in large pots and ladled out to order. The food here is honest Turkish home cooking, the kind that a grandmother might have set on the family table: pieces of tender stewed lamb in tomato and onion sauce, cubed beef with potatoes and carrots, white beans slow-cooked with sheep-tail fat and garlic, stuffed peppers heavy with rice and pine nuts, bulgur pilaf perfumed with green pepper. Trays of fresh vegetables arrive from the wholesale market in the early hours, and the kitchen prepares each day's menu of perhaps twelve to fifteen dishes on the basis of what has come in that morning. All meat served is halal in accordance with the straightforward religious expectations of the Turkish customer base, and alcohol is not part of the offering. The dining room is unpretentious, with simple wooden chairs, paper tablecloths, and the rapid, confident service of waiters who know their regulars by name. Prices remain within reach of ordinary working people, and the midday rush is a brisk, good-humoured affair that winds down by mid-afternoon, after which the staff take their own lunch together at a back table. Mutlu Lokantası has become a small institution in its neighbourhood precisely because of this consistency: the same dishes, the same families in the kitchen, the same warm welcome for newcomers. The cook's grandmother began the business more than forty years ago from a small kitchen two streets away, and her old handwritten recipes, pinned to the kitchen wall, are still consulted by her grandsons who run the kitchen today — a small, characteristically Turkish continuity that diners will taste in every spoonful without ever having to be told it is there. For Muslim visitors to Ankara who want a genuine taste of Turkish cuisine without any worry about the provenance of the meat, it is an excellent and straightforward choice, and a cup of strong black tea to finish is of course included.