A spicy Turkish dish with big flavours and big pasta, all topped with garlicky yoghurt sauce

Biber salçası is a Turkish paste made from concentrated cooked red peppers and salt. It comes in two varieties: acı (spicy) and tatlı (sweet). The hotter version adds a deep, umami heat to cumin-spiced lamb in this pasta recipe, which in Turkey is known as markana. Traditionally, markana is served with garlicky yoghurt and a generous drizzle of chilli butter enlivened with pul biber and sumac. With flavours this loud, it’s best to use a large pasta shape such as paccheri, because its cavernous middles can hold satisfying morsels of the filling.

Flavour Heroes: 15 Modern Pantry Ingredients to Amplify Your Cooking, by Gurdeep Loyal, is published by Quadrille at £27. To order a copy for £24.30, go to guardianbookshop.com

A spice-rich twist on a classic soup, and poached eggs with garlic yoghurt and green chutney

While purists might scoff and find the combination of spices in my French onion soup a little blasphemous, do give it a shot. Nigella seeds are the best flavour-enhancer for onions, while using ghee instead of butter adds a warm, nutty, caramel flavour. Then, my Indian-inspired twist on çılbır, the classic Turkish breakfast of poached eggs with yoghurt. It features my go-to poached egg method, which I learned from Nigella Lawson.

Our main course arrived heavy and somewhat intimidating, and left picked completely clean

Earlier this month, a kind-of Turkish ocakbaşı opened on a corner in London’s Soho. The brains behind Kid are chef Sertaç Dirik and restaurateur David Carter, and I say “kind-of” because, yes, while it has a Turkish-influenced menu – sucuk with grilled peach, pide, börek, hummus, içli köfte with aged beef – and the whiff of live fire, nothing either of them does is ever remotely straightforward, hence the buzz around their new place.

Carter founded Smokestak a decade ago in Shoreditch, a wild, Americana-tinged barbecue joint where, somehow, he made brisket in buns and peach cobbler old fashioneds London’s hottest ticket. Five years later, he opened Manteca, also in Shoreditch, a reimagining of the Italian trattoria for the 2020s, followed by Oma, his Greek-influenced Michelin-starred venture in Borough, and its little sister Agora, and all of them remain dependable places where you get serious bang for your buck. All of those influences – American smoke, Italian flair and Greek boldness – are present and correct at Kid. Dirik’s story, meanwhile, has about it elements of TV’s The Bear: a Copenhagen-trained chef cajoled home to bolster the family business and going on to create the hugely loved Mangal 2 in Dalston. What Dirik and Carter have in common, aside from reputation, is a love of setting fire to stuff, in a culinary sense rather than in a Prodigy’s Twisted Firestarter sense. Kid’s Galata mackerel is testament to this: it’s almost completely blackened and has an incredible hit of smoke in its flesh.

The first genuinely cool thing to have happened in Borough Market for ages

A Turkish-Cypriot meyhane, which translates roughly as “wine house”, has slotted in upstairs at the Globe Tavern in Borough Market, south London. Any cab driver worth his salt will bend your ear over the fact that this is “where Bridget Jones lives”, which might be a bit confusing if you’ve booked in to eat kuzu şiş (lamb neck kebabs) and to knock back a couple of rakis with a fermented turnip juice chaser.

That Bridget Jones trivia, by the way, is completely true: the upstairs space at the Globe was used as the heroine’s gaff in that famous film franchise. Now, however, when you climb the staircase up to Kismet, an old, slightly eerie and flickering TV by the restaurant entrance begins to tell a very different tale. This is chef Keiran Mustafa’s very personal tribute to his family’s homeland and the community they built in London. Mustafa was the opening head chef at BiBi, to my mind one of the best restaurants in London, and before that he worked at industry stalwarts Chez Bruce and the Harwood Arms.

Essential new titles for your kitchen shelf – plus a classic to rediscover

Istanbul
Özlem Warren (Quadrille, £28)

Coconuts, watermelon … hot doughnuts? We asked five globetrotting chefs for their most memorable seaside eats

Picture a high-summer day at a far-flung beach: the faint putter of lapping waves, drifting plume of suncream scent, and the approaching call of a food hawker making their way across the molten sand. What would you expect, or want, them to be selling? Though cold drinks, fresh fruit and miraculously unmelted ice-creams feel universal, the street snacks and beachside dishes that we crave vary wildly across countries and cultures.

So what pairs best with open water and a coastal breeze all around the world? What should you be on the lookout for when holidaying this summer? And what should you avoid? Here, from custard doughnuts in Portugal and chilli-spiked Mexican coconut pulp to flash-fried red mullet in Cyprus, five chefs fly the flag for the culturally distinct, freshly prepared beach dishes that they spend the whole year craving.

Chicken kebabs and Turkish rice: a perfect weeknight supper.

For these succulent kebabs, tavuk (chicken), marinated in yoghurt, olive oil and spices, is threaded on to şiş (skewers). Often served with pilav and roast vegetables, they are popular throughout Turkey. My father, Orhan, was a lawyer with the Turkish government’s transport department, which has an employees’ lokanta (restaurant) in Ortaköy, İstanbul, with mesmerising views of the Bosphorus. I have very fond memories of enjoying tavuk şiş with my family there.

Honey and cinnamon bring a warming, Istanbul-inspired spin to a classic

The scent of honey and warm pastry that spills out of the late-night baklava shops on Taksim Square in Istanbul is the inspiration for this twist on the classic old fashioned. The honey, cinnamon and walnut slip in perfectly without overpowering proceedings.

Andrea Ena, bar manager, Nora, London E22

A warming, scoop-it-up tomato and egg dish a bit like shakshuka, but the zippy lemony yoghurt and harissa give away its Turkish roots

I am not the type of person to say, “These eggs will change your life”, but these eggs changed my life, so they may also make a sizeable dent in yours. The recipe is based on (but not authentic to) the Turkish dish menemen. There is much to love about these eggs, not least how magnificently delicious they are and how fun it is to scoop them up with hot flatbread. On a practical note, meanwhile, they can be eaten at any mealtime and, if not finished, reheated later. Which, if you love eggs and leftovers as much as I do, is a (small) dream come true.

Enfield’s family-run Neco Tantuni, which specialises in Turkish street food, secured place among other Michelin-starred restaurants on Vittles 99-strong list

On a list of London’s best restaurants, you would expect to see the usual Michelin-starred suspects such as The Ledbury, Ikoyi and The Ritz. But high among these culinary heavyweights sits a humble salonu tucked away in the depths of north London.

Neco Tantuni, a small Turkish eatery specialising in the foodie delights of Mersin, a city located on the southern coast of Turkey, has been crowned the fourth best restaurant in London by Vittles, the trendy food magazine that has become a bible for those looking for the best (and more off-the-radar) grub in the capital.