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> Editorial
> What's the Story?
> Mrs. Fixit
> Desperately Seeking Ingredients...
> Passionate about Mill Road
> Caribbean Masterchef
> Everything is Possible!
> A Sanctuary on Mill Road
> Boat People
> Going Green with Al-Amin
> The Akashi Project
> Open All Hours
> Mesmerised by Meze
> Come Together
> The Girl from Arapau
> Still Sweet and Spicy
> A Real Neighourhood
> Lei Si Fan Mei?
> Flight from Baghdad
> Streets of Revolution
> Stepping up the Ladder
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Mesmerised by Meze
Cenker Ucan came to Britain from Istanbul in Turkey. The owner of Cambridge’s prize-winning newest eatery talks to Cambridge Untold about waking up as a child to a military coup, and leaving London’s most select restaurants for Mill Road. |
I’m sitting in the Meze Bar in Romsey just over the bridge in Mill Road. It’s hard to believe that before it opened its doors in June 2006, this space had long been the dilapidated premises of an electrical repair shop. Now, it’s a stylish diminutive place done out in pale wood, with tasteful etchings of nineteenth century Istanbul on its creamy walls. What wrought such a transformation? Its present owner Cenker Ucan had just been told by his wife that they were expecting their first child, and Cenker (pronounced Jenker) had gone for a long city walk to take in the enormity of the news that he was going to be a father. Setting out from his home near the Coldhams Lane Sainsburys’, his mind on the future, he was walking along Mill Road when he spotted a sign in the dusty window of the closed down Fairdeals Electrical shop. It said Consent Given for A3 (meaning the premises could be converted into a cafe dealing in food and beverages). Buoyed by the good news his wife had given him, Cenker decided then and there, that on this at first glance unprepossessing site, he would open Mill Road’s first Turkish Meze restaurant.
It’s 3 o’clock on a dull February day and I’m catching Cenker in the mid-afternoon lull between his lunch time customers and a party of twenty four who have booked the Meze Bar for the evening. ‘Meze…’ explains the proud owner, serving me a latte and sitting down opposite at one of the six tables, ‘it’s the name we give to any small dish, something like a Turkish tapa. There are over 600. We make them fresh with meat, cheese, sea food, with herbs and vegetables fried in olive oil. You want to try our anchovy meze?’
It is surprising to hear that the idea for this meze bar, conceived with Cenker’s first child, now a thriving baby boy of two, almost never happened at all.
‘I made an offer but I was broke at the time, I had 70p in my pocket! I told a good friend my crazy idea. He put up £15,000 straight off. I raised another £45,000 and things started happening. There was a lot of red tape, I had to have disability access put in for the toilets and fire doors and escapes. In Britain the council is very particular about things like that, and the legislation keeps changing. The first builder left the job unfinished – basically ripped me off twenty thousand quid – so I had to get in another firm to complete the conversion. I was low on cash, the first week’s rent was due, we were due to open…it got stressful.’
So, what made Cenker want to open a Turkish eatery on Mill Road? It’s not as though there aren’t any others. ‘I’m not about kebabs’, Cenker explains. ‘And I don’t do takeaway. Meze is different. I’m a meze guy.’ Had market research revealed a niche for an upmarket restaurant offering Mediterranean food on the Romsey side of the bridge? ‘I didn’t do any marketing’, Cenker shrugs. ‘No business plan. Just word of mouth. I wasn’t at all sure we were going to make it, but we went ahead and opened our doors the first night and the place filled up. Ninety percent of my customers live in the neighbourhood. Some couples, they eat here two maybe three times a week.’
The son of a successful Istanbul restaurant and club owner, Cenker did not come into the restaurant business by accident. ‘My father owned a fish restaurant under the famous Eminonu Bridge in Istanbul. He had a club as well, seven outlets altogether including a really modern meze bar, kind of like this one in a smart district called Beyoglu. In fact, at 19 I became bar manager in Les Parisiens, Turkey’s only striptease club! You know, in Turkey we have a great food culture, we like to go out and eat really late, at around 9:30. When we sit down for a dinner it lasts hours, lots of friends, everyone’s children around, lots of shots of aniseed raki, and of course, lots of mezes.’
The various red tape and building challenges Cenker faced in transforming the old Fairdeals Electrical outlet into Mill Road’s only meze bar pales in comparison with the setbacks his father had faced in Istanbul in the 80s. ‘Just when things were going well for my dad’s restaurants, Turkey had a military coup. The generals imposed a curfew so no one was allowed to go out after midnight. In Turkey that’s when we do our eating and drinking, so the curfew hit the restaurant trade very badly. My father lost all his businesses. I watched them all close, one after the other.’
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| "I love Romsey. I buy my wine from Threshers down the road, I buy my vegetables from Hilary’s across the road, and my meat from the Notun Bangla Bazaar, the halal butcher’s next door. They support me and I support them. There is a great community feeling here." |
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What did the nine-year-old Cenker remember of that military crackdown of 12 September 1980? ‘I remember waking up in my bedroom, it was a warm September morning. It was still the holidays and usually I would hit the street early to hang out with my friends. But that morning everything was eerily silent, you know, no traffic noise outside, nothing. When I looked into our street, it was like a ghost town! I felt a kind of nervous silence in the house too. I remember we lived in a third floor flat at the bottom of a hill and at the top was one of Istanbul’s main streets, Cumhuriyet Street. I saw tanks passing one after the other. My parents turned the TV on to find out what the hell was going on, but the screen was blank! Then at about 2 pm all these generals appeared on TV in uniform and announced the military takeover. It was a nightmare. There was constant propaganda, curfews, arrests, especially of left wingers like my parents.
People were hanged. It all lasted three years till around 1983. The coup cost my father all his businesses, including his meze bar like this one…’
Cenker’s eyes flicker, and he is back again in his Mill Road restaurant. He casts a fond proprietary glance over the creamy walls, its polished hardwood tables illuminated by discreet lighting. The coffee machine behind the bar hisses steam and Cenker asks his waitress, Aysegul, who comes from Turkey’s Black Sea coast, to fetch me another latte. She has been busying herself behind the bar, but not without lending an ear to Cenker’s Istanbul reminiscences.
‘I do get homesick sometimes’, says Cenker, unprompted. Often? I ask. It’s as if in his busy life he has not had time to think about Istanbul and has just realised how important the city is to him.
‘Like five times a day!’ he laughs, and lights a cigarette. ‘No, seriously. I love Cambridge but I miss my city, it’s a unique place. And Bosphorus!’ (he says Bosphorus dropping the English article ‘the’). The seemingly magic word crops up at various points in our conversation and whenever it does, a faraway look appears in the down to earth entrepreneur’s eyes. When I say I have never seen the famed straits which Istanbul straddles, the spot where Europe meets Asia, he shakes his head in commiseration and proceeds to evoke its beauty for me: a jumble of pastel-painted fretworked houses flowing down the wooded hills spiked by black cypress to the edge of the glittering blue sea, the spires of the many mosques pricking the skyline, the rounded form of the Galata Tower from which Byzantine soldiers once looked out over Istanbul as far as Tarabia Beach washed by Bosphorus…
I glance out through the large windows of the Meze Bar at Mill Road. A light stringy drizzle has started and passers-by, quickening their pace, hunch their shoulders into the wind. It’s a long way from the Bosphorus. Cenker, however, seems oblivious.
‘And the people! I miss the people of Istanbul. You see, people from my city don’t really see themselves as just Turkish. The real natives of Istanbul are not Turkish at all, but Rumi. They date back to Byzantium and they were there before the Turks when Istanbul was called Constantinople. And there are other ethnic minorities too, different cultures, Armenians, Kurds and people from the Black Sea, it’s very cosmopolitan, a real mosaic. In fact, that’s what I like so much about Britain. When I first came to London I immediately felt at home with my Asian or Greek neighbours. It’s the mosaic effect again.’
So what made Cenker leave Turkey to come to Britain?
| "I love Cambridge but I miss my city, it’s a unique place. And Bosphorus!” (He says Bosphorus dropping the English article ‘the’). The seemingly magic word crops up at various points in our conversation and whenever it does, a faraway look appears in the down to earth entrepreneur’s eyes." |
‘Well, when I turned 21, I received a letter from the military: they gave me three weeks to report for eighteen months compulsory military service’. I’m pretty anti-military, I wouldn’t like to bear arms or be under anyone’s orders. I think that played the biggest part in my coming over here. The British Consulate in Istanbul gave me a two-month visa to come to England. I arrived in Stansted in September 1991. I chanced upon the nicest immigration officer because he looked at the letter from the Consulate and my two-month visa, and extended it for a full year!’ |
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Hearing Cenker’s story, what springs to mind is the image of a man repeatedly landing on his feet. Only 21 at the time, he landed a job as barman at the London Hilton Olympia near the Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre where (‘would you believe it?’) the general manager turned out to be Turkish. Learning the hospitality trade on the hoof, it wasn’t long before the bright and capable young Turk had moved on to the position of head barman at the fashionable Westbury Hotel in the West End. ‘Money wise I was doing very well and the plan was just to stay a couple of years and return to Turkey. But the thing is, see, I was spending a lot too, you know. I’d earn it and spend it the same day.’
Next came Cenker’s promotion to bar manager at the prestigious China House complex next to the Piccadilly Ritz. It was all going swimmingly, Cenker’s ascendant life curve fully living up to the dream of every immigrant arriving in a foreign capital in search of the good life. When he met his wife Lisa, an English girl who worked at Selfridges, life could not get better. Here Cenker breaks into a smile and you catch the flipside of the earnest, hardworking entrepreneur. ‘My wife and I used to go out three or four times a week. We loved London. Soho, Covent Garden, our favourite place was l’Odéon on Regent Street, we’d order champagne, the works!’ he shrugs and grins. ‘Hey, I’m Turkish.’
But in 2000 came news which changed Cenker’s life, and which accounts for why he is now in his Cambridge Meze Bar talking to me: he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease.
‘Inflammation of the intestine’, he explains. ‘I’d got very thin, I couldn’t eat and I was really sick. I was off work for six weeks, and when I went back I couldn’t enjoy it anymore, I was just psychologically off work. Then we decided to come to Cambridge…’
Why Cambridge? ‘Well’, Cenker explains, casting his mind back seven years. It’s as if the genesis of the decision to move here is only now fully hitting him. ‘My wife, Lisa, she came on a day trip… She came home and said Cambridge was really pretty and maybe we should go and live there, and I said okay. So, I sold the flat and bought a house here…’
Had he visited the city? I want to know. ‘Nah’, Cenker shrugs, with a look that says, ‘Lisa fell in love with Cambridge. You know, she’s more than a wife to me, she’s my best friend, my advisor, everything. I trust her judgement.’ So they moved in early summer when Cambridge is at its most seductive, white mayflower swathing the trees and the first punts drifting down the Cam. But what did Cenker the metropolitan bon vivant make of this quiet university city?
‘A bit boring after London’, he admits. ‘But we moved into a house with a garden which is a luxury in London, I picked up a bike and enjoyed cycling around, I got a dog... then there was the baby.’
It was only after they’d moved to Cambridge and Cenker started getting treatment at Addenbrooke’s that he realised the Cambridge hospital was at the cutting edge of research into his condition (‘would you believe it?’). He’d landed on his feet again. But perhaps it was not pure coincidence. ‘We never really spoke about it, Lisa and me, but I think it was the reason she chose Cambridge. I think she knew. I still have Crohn’s. The disease does affect your life, but I’ve had an operation, and you have to learn to live with it. You can’t give up in life because you have a disease. That’s why when I heard we were going to have a child, I went for that long walk, and when I happened upon that sign in that old half-derelict building, right where we’re sitting now, I decided “I’m going to make a go of it.” I wanted life to continue as normal’.
The telephone behind the bar trills and Aysegul takes the call. Cenker cocks an ear and listens in. ‘You see’, he smiles, ‘she’s taking a confirmation for a booking later this week. A local couple celebrating with 23 of their friends… I love Romsey. I buy my wine from Threshers down the road, I buy my vegetables from Hilary’s across the road, and my meat from the Notun Bangla Bazaar, the halal butcher’s next door. They support me and I support them. There is a great community feeling here’.
And Cenker’s plans for the future? ‘A few more Meze Bars would be nice,’ he grins. So, what of the original plan of spending a couple years and going back to the shores of the Bosphorus. ‘Cambridge is home now’, he sighs philosophically. ‘Wherever I earn my bread, that’s my home. Besides, I have a little son now, William’. A very English name I point out. ‘Yes, but his middle name is Timucin which is the birth name of Genghis Khan…and I’m teaching him to speak Turkish. You know, he says Mummy in Turkish and me he calls Daddy in English….’ Cenker’s delight is unmistakable. ‘It’s why I do all this’, he says. ‘It’s for him. Every parent wants the best for their child.’
So after sixteen years, is Cenker here to stay? ‘To be honest, if I went back to Turkey I would miss Cambridge’. What would he miss? We look out at the early evening winter murk settling on Mill Road and the rush hour traffic backing up bumper to bumper down towards Brookfields.
‘I’d miss a lot. Weather isn’t everything. You know, people in Britain are lucky. You can do anything you want to do in this country, you don’t have to bribe anyone, nothing dodgy. It’s a really open society. And I love the fact that there are so many different kinds of people here. It’s making this place rich, not in money but culturally, you know? This place is in Europe, but not in Europe. That’s its uniqueness. Istanbul is where Europe meets Asia, but Britain, it’s where all the world meets.’
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