The Friday before Christmas and we were trying to get to Waitrose in Caversham to buy seasonal essentials such as gold all butter puff pastry (not the green type they sell at Tesco, oh no!). But it was hopeless.

It took a while to get onto the IDR and then fifteen minutes to get to the Reading Bridge roundabout. A quick rethink and we headed for Vastern Road but encountered the same problem. It transpired that this was the perfect storm - a gridlock starting and ending at, I suspected from looking at Waze, the ludicrous double mini roundabout layout in central Caversham.

Google was promising 25 minutes to get from Caversham Road to the Caversham Waitrose.  After quickly consulting Waze again, this called for a quick diversion to Woodley, where everything seemed a lot calmer.

Despite having to navigate the gridlock that is Cemetery Junction, I often find myself driving up to Woodley to shop from Central Reading, where parking is easy and there is a great selection of shops such as Robert Dyas and HK Supermarket selling things that are sometimes difficult to find in the centre of town.

Woodley is a curious suburb. I think it widely regards itself as not part of Reading at all, perhaps fairly so. Parts are five miles from the centre of Reading and officially it is in the exalted borough of Wokingham. Which begs the question in the era of urban sprawl, where does one place begin and the other end ? As a teenager in the 1920s my gran worked as a nanny in Streatham and used to talk about going through the villages of Brixton and Stockwell on her way into London. How times change. And it is not difficult to trace a path from Bracknell to Emmer Green where not a field can be seen with yet more infill to come.

Yaprak, or rather its predecessor, Le De Kitchen (which briefly also had a branch in Marketplace) has always been a fave of mine. Yaprak means ‘leaf’ and is used as a symbol of renewal – perhaps using ‘Phoenix’ was just not right for this reborn with few changes restaurant - it is also used in dish names such as  "yaprak sarması," which are grape leaves stuffed with a savoury filling. Clever.

Unfortunately, in the current climate for restaurants, more and more are disappearing and reappearing under new names. Valpy’s became The Cellar, the same in all but name, which is also true for this new leaf.

Now I have a long held a love for Turkey. When my contemporaries in the later eighties and nineties were heading to Ibiza and Aya Napa, I would pop over to Turkey three or four times a year. 

The combination of culture, wonderful and diverse food, easy travel and lively, welcoming, friendly people (as well as sea, sand, cheap drink and knock off music cassettes) was irresistible.

So I got to know and understand a lot about Turkish food, from the lokantarali working men's lunch caffs where you could get wonderful stews for a few tens of pence to the full on seafood restaurants aiming their rather more expensive but fresh and delicious products on the quay fronts of Kos, Ayvalik and the larger tourist towns.

Turkish may still be my desert island cuisine (you know, if there was only one cuisine you could eat again). Indeed, I spent my last holiday on a wonderful small island off Fethyie where the food was exquisite, but, by now, eye wateringly expensive. Somewhere in the past thirty years a Turkish meal in Turkey has become more expensive than in the UK.

Despite having many kebab shops, such as Marmaris in Caversham Road, Reading is poorly served with this wonderful cuisine. So, after an arduous round at Waitrose my wife loaded the car with our gold puff pastry and other delicacies and popped over the precinct. At two thirty we were the only punters in what is a cavernous and welcoming room with an open kitchen at one end and a bar at the other.

We decided to go for a shared hot starter platter and then to share an Islander kebab - one of my favourites.



The starter was a meal in itself. The halloumi cheese was plump and didn't dry out as halloumi often does when grilled. The sucuk sausage came sliced, oily and slightly spicy with Aleppo pepper. The thickly filled muska boregi, a samosa shapped filo pastry parcel stuffed with spinach and soft cheese was oozing.

Unfortunately the felafel was rather dry and wholly uninspiring, coming in a flat coin shape like the ones you get from a bad supermarket. Normally, this would have been a deal breaker, but this was strangely the only mis-step in an otherwise lovely meal.

The starter meze also came with a lovely soft chunky and perfectly battered calamari, mucver (veg fritters made from deep fried courgette, carrot parsley and feta), aubergine dip and hummus and lovely flatbread straight out of the oven.

Just yum. If I could have this for lunch every day I would live in Groundhog Day and really good value for money.



The main course of Iskender kebab has long been a favourite of mine. It is kofte like shredded lamb with mince and herbs, charcoal grilled and served on toasted bread with a tomato sauce and a yoghurt and butter sauce that is as mouthwatering as it sounds. The meat was delicious as were the sauces, I was less keen on the shredded bread – I prefer versions of this dish that use a flatbread as a base, but that is really nitpicking.

On the side was pilaf rice and bulgar wheat.

An Efes beer (brewed partially using rice and a Turkish staple since 1969) washed it all down nicely.

Needless to say, despite sharing, it was too much food and we ended up eating the left overs for lunch the following day.

And that sums up Turkish food and the food here at Yaprak in particular. Delicious, good value for money and plentiful. I can’t wait until the Waitrose shop has to be topped up for New Year...