O’Doner | La Mer

Take me back to the streets of Turkey! And if you can’t, then just take me to La Mer. Because O’Doner at Central La Mer will exceed every expectation you have about Turkish street food, and make you feel like you’ve discovered a brand new side of this remarkable cuisine that you’d never imagined before.

Right from the colorful interiors to the designs on the tables and plates – everything in O’Doner speaks one language – that of excellence. While the dishes are priced a tad bit on the higher side, the portions are huge, so you don’t really need to order a lot of food. But having said that, I do recommend you go with your family or a group of friends so you can try out some of their bestsellers without feeling too guilty of overeating or overspending.

Let’s get started on everything we tried (most of which we packed for lunch), and everything we enjoyed.

Since I was so impressed with their street style menu, instead of trying out the usual hot and cold appetizers, we hopped on to salad and pide. With a very fresh mixture of greens, green apple, pomegranate molasses and seeds, walnuts and olive oil, the Chef’s Special Salad was such a delight. I really liked the mix of sweet and sour flavors with the added crunch of apples and walnuts.

For pide we chose the All-in-One Pide, simply because this allowed us to sample a little of everything – spicy sausage, beef cubes, minced meat and cheese. I don’t really remember which of these flavors were the best, because they all were really good. More importantly, the bread was hot off the oven, which gave it that fresh baked bread and cheesy fragrance, making it even more tempting for us.

Next up was my favorite dish of the evening – O’ropean style Chicken Doner with Lavash Bread. Almost like a giant burger, this one had chicken doner tossed with lettuce, cabbage, onion and tomato and drizzled with chili salsa, herbs and dill aioli – all packed inside a lavash bread.

Now I don’t mean to start a riot here, but I even told the restaurant manager that the taste of this sandwich was better than anything I had tried in Turkey! The slim cuts of chicken were perfect, and the whole marination + grilling gave it a slightly charred texture, which when combined with the sauces and lavash bread, exploded into a burst of comforting flavors. So good was this, I made sure I pack the other half (yes, it was big), and keep it hidden so I can enjoy it all by myself the next day. And enjoy I did.

This same dish comes in multiple variants – this means you can opt for pita or lavash bread, chicken or meat doner, and O’ropean style (which we ordered) or O’granate style which comes with walnuts, pomegranate, feta and chili salsa.

If you like sandwiches, you can also try the Adana Kebab burger, Turkish Delight burger, Sausage street sandwich and more. I will be trying all of these real real soon.

For kebabs, we were recommended the O’Doner Special – Pineapple Kebab. This basically features a pineapple shell stuffed with 5-hour cooked lamb leg and rice. I, however, wasn’t in the mood for this, so we chose to go with other dishes. But this comes highly recommended, so you might want to give it a try.

Another bestseller is their Bursa Iskender Kebab. Again, we had tried that quite recently at another restaurant, so we gave that a miss and went with Dynamite Filletto and Turkish Bagel Kebab.

While I always always go for Adana Kebabs, this time I decided to skip the original ones, and go for a slightly twist version of the kebabs instead. This I found in the Turkish Bagel Kebabs. Essentially grilled lamb Adana Kebabs wrapped in pita bread, toasted and cut into pieces, these came stuffed with cheese and sauces that took the flavour of Adana to a whole new level. I loved this dish, but we had to pack half of it because we still had the next one to conquer.

The Dynamite Filletto were steak fillets stuffed with kasahar cheese. It was quite a mixed feeling to see the cheese oozing out as soon as you slice into it. Mixed feelings because it looked really tempting, but also really heavy. It was meaty, cheesy and had a moreish taste to it. But we obviously couldn’t finish it. My plus one had one piece, while I barely managed a couple of bites. But we packed the rest and brought it home for lunch next day.

Despite my plans to order a Kunafa or Baklava, we had to give their desserts a miss because we just couldn’t eat anything more. In fact there were so many more items – like their breakfast (which is priced at AED 70 for two and includes my fav bal kaymak), falafel, baked potato, pastry, sucuk, kebabs, etc. – which we wanted to eat, but simply had to put it off till later. However, we did order the classic Turkish tea, which was a bliss, and left with bookmarked items to come back soon and try them all.

O’Doner

Location: Central, La Mer, Jumeirah 1, Dubai
Contact: 04 2441166

View this restaurant on Zomato