The charcoal grills of Green Lanes and Dalston are run by people from Turkey, and the names over the doors tell you which part of it: Diyarbakır and Urfa in the Kurdish south-east, Antep and Adana further west. The regional label is the single most useful thing on the shopfront, because it predicts what the kitchen is good at. And the meal most visitors never think to come for is breakfast, which in this cuisine is a table covered in small plates rather than a plate of food.
Our guide to Turkish food in London has the geography of Green Lanes, how an ocakbaşı works and what to ask for from the grill, and our page on Dalston and Stoke Newington covers the Kingsland Road end. This page adds the regional reading of the shopfronts, the named addresses with their hygiene ratings, and the breakfast.
Reading the shopfront
- Diyarbakır, Urfa, Mardin, Adıyaman
- Cities of the Kurdish-majority south-east of Turkey. Expect flatbread cooked in front of you, lamb, bulgur, and a milder, smokier chilli than you would guess
- Antep (Gaziantep)
- Not Kurdish-majority, and the pastry capital of Turkey. A shop with Antep in its name is where to buy baklava and künefe
- Adana
- A place name that has become a dish: minced lamb with red pepper, hand-pressed onto a flat skewer. The spicier of the two standard kebabs
- Ocakbaşı
- "By the hearth". A restaurant built round an open charcoal pit, often with counter seats facing it
- Pastane, fırın
- Patisserie and bakery. Where the breakfast breads, the simit and the pastries come from
- Kahvaltı
- Breakfast. Literally "before coffee". A spread of fifteen or twenty small plates, not a single dish
Grand Parade, which is four businesses wide in places
The densest stretch of this food in Britain is not Green Lanes as a whole but one terrace of it: Grand Parade, N4, a few hundred metres of shopfronts near Harringay Green Lanes station. One family name occupies four separate registered businesses in a row, each doing a different job, and the addresses are consecutive.
| Address | What it is | Hygiene rating | Last inspected |
|---|---|---|---|
| Antepliler Doner, 43 Grand Parade | Doner counter | 5 | 4 February 2026 |
| Antepliler Kunefe, 44 Grand Parade | Künefe and hot puddings | 5 | 4 February 2026 |
| Antepliler Restaurant, 45-46 Grand Parade | The sit-down restaurant | 5 | 10 October 2025 |
| Antepliler Baklava, 47 Grand Parade | Pastry shop | 5 | 2 December 2025 |
| Diyarbakir Kitchen, 52-53 Grand Parade | South-eastern grill | 5 | 1 February 2025 |
| Gokyuzu Restaurant, 26-28 Grand Parade | Large grill, the busiest on the street | 5 | 2 May 2025 |
| Hala, 29-31 Grand Parade | Grill and mezze | 4 | 4 February 2026 |
| Hala Manti, 31B Grand Parade | Mantı, the Turkish dumpling | 5 | 1 May 2025 |
Further along the road, Selale Restaurant at 1-3 Salisbury Promenade, N8, holds rating 5, inspected 3 February 2026, and Petek Restaurant on Stroud Green Road, N4, holds rating 5, inspected 6 February 2026. Both are a walk from the Grand Parade cluster and both are quieter on a Saturday night, which is worth knowing. On Green Lanes itself, the Yasar Halim bakery at 495-497 holds rating 5, inspected 9 May 2025.
Order the dumplings at the dumpling shop, not the grill. The split-business pattern on Grand Parade is not a gimmick. The shop selling künefe has a hot-plate and a person who does nothing else; the mantı shop boils dumplings to order and serves them under garlic yoghurt and burnt butter. A grill restaurant three doors away will make you both, and neither as well.
Dalston, and the one we will not name
Dalston and Stoke Newington do the same food in Zone 2, which matters if you are staying centrally, because you can eat late and get home. Three addresses we checked and are willing to name:
- Mangal II, 4 Stoke Newington Road, N16. Rating 5, inspected 4 February 2025. Established in 1994 according to the restaurant's own site, which also gives the useful definition: mangal is the Anatolian word for the open charcoal fire people gather round to eat.
- Devran Restaurant, 170-172 Stoke Newington Road, N16. Rating 5, inspected 19 February 2026.
- Mangal, 27 Stoke Newington Road, N16. Rating 3, inspected 22 January 2026. A separate business from Mangal II despite the name.
One of the best-known grills on this street holds a hygiene rating of 2 and we will not name it. Two out of five means improvement is necessary, and the rating has stood for nearly three years. It appears in a great deal of London food writing. Look up any Dalston grill by its street number on ratings.food.gov.uk before you sit down, because on this street the ratings run from 2 to 5 within a hundred metres.
There is also a Gokyuzu branch at 339 Kentish Town Road, NW5, rating 5, inspected 18 June 2025, which is the easiest of all of these to reach from central London and serves the same menu as the Green Lanes original, a few minutes from Kentish Town.
Turkish breakfast: what arrives, in order
A proper kahvaltı is the most generous meal in this cuisine and the one least likely to appear in a guidebook. It is not eggs on a plate. It is a table covered in fifteen or twenty small dishes, brought all at once, eaten with bread and tea over an hour or more, usually shared between two or more people.
What should be on it:
- Cheeses. Beyaz peynir, the white brined cheese, and usually kaşar, a firm yellow one. Sometimes a herbed cheese from the east.
- Olives, green and black, dressed with oil and often with thyme or pepper flakes.
- Tomato, cucumber and green pepper, cut small, unseasoned. You dress them yourself.
- Butter and honey, and in a good spread kaymak, a thick clotted cream eaten with honey and bread. This is the item to look for: if kaymak is on the table, the kitchen is serious.
- Tahini and pekmez, sesame paste and grape molasses, stirred together into something between a sauce and a pudding.
- Eggs. Either menemen, scrambled slowly with tomato and green pepper, or sucuklu yumurta, fried with slices of the spiced beef sausage.
- Börek, layered pastry with cheese or spinach, and sometimes sigara böreği, the cigarette-shaped fried version.
- Bread, brought hot and replaced, plus simit, the sesame-crusted ring.
- Tea, black, in small tulip glasses, refilled until you stop them.
Our estimate for the cost, September 2026, is £15 to £25 a head for a full spread for two people sharing, which is roughly what a cooked English breakfast costs in a central London hotel, and about four times the food.
Ring before you go for breakfast. Whether a particular restaurant serves kahvaltı, on which days, and until what time, is not published in any form we could read: the sites of the main Green Lanes restaurants are built in a way our research tools cannot see into, and none of them lists breakfast hours in plain text. The reliable method is a telephone call the day before. As a rule, the bakeries and patisseries serve it from early morning every day and the big grills serve it at weekends into the afternoon, but treat that as a pattern and not a promise.
What the south-eastern kitchens do differently
If the grill rather than the breakfast is what you are after, our page on Turkish food covers the ocakbasi rooms in more detail, and the Edgware Road is a different tradition again, closer to Beirut than to Diyarbakir.
Three things distinguish a grill from the south-east of Turkey from a general Turkish restaurant, and all three are visible at the table.
The bread. In the best of these places the flatbread is slapped onto the side of a hot oven or cooked on a domed plate in front of you, and it arrives in waves through the meal. It is not a basket you finish before the food comes; it is the cutlery.
Bulgur, not rice. Cracked wheat is the staple grain of the region, and it turns up as a pilaf beside the grill, in kısır, a salad closer to a Levantine tabbouleh, and inside içli köfte, a stuffed bulgur shell.
The chilli. Pepper flakes from this region are more fruity and smoky than sharply hot, which is why a dish described as spicy often is not, by South Asian or Sichuan standards. The heat that is there comes mostly from the acılı ezme, the raw tomato and pepper relish, which you should ask for.
Alcohol is the one thing to check. Several of these restaurants hold no licence and let you bring your own, some hold a full licence and will not open outside bottles, and some serve no alcohol at all. Our Turkish food guide, linked above, sets out the three cases; ring rather than guessing from the window.
Getting there, and when to go
Harringay Green Lanes station, on the Suffragette line of the London Overground, puts you in the middle of the Grand Parade cluster; Manor House and Turnpike Lane on the Piccadilly line sit at either end of the strip. For Dalston, use Dalston Junction or Dalston Kingsland. Our page on the Overground's six line names explains which line is which, and buses are usually simpler than the Tube for this part of London.
Timing, for a visitor: come for a late lunch on a weekday and you will walk into any of these restaurants and get a counter seat facing the fire, which is the best seat in the house. Friday and Saturday from about eight in the evening the well-known places fill up with large tables and the wait can be half an hour. For breakfast, weekend late mornings are the point, and it is the one meal where booking is worth the phone call. Our guide to Angel and Finsbury Park covers what else is at the southern end of Green Lanes, and halal food in London covers the certification question, since most of these kitchens are halal.
Frequently asked questions
Are the Green Lanes restaurants Kurdish or Turkish?
Both, and Turkish Cypriot as well. We could not verify the ownership of individual businesses, so we will not label them, but the regional names on the shopfronts are a genuine guide to the cooking: Diyarbakır, Urfa and Mardin are cities of the Kurdish-majority south-east, while Antep and Adana are not.
What is a Turkish breakfast?
A shared spread of fifteen to twenty small plates brought at once: white and yellow cheeses, olives, cut tomato and cucumber, butter, honey with clotted cream, tahini with grape molasses, eggs either scrambled with tomato or fried with spiced sausage, pastries, hot bread and endless black tea in tulip glasses.
Where can I get Turkish breakfast in London?
Along Green Lanes in Harringay and on Stoke Newington Road in Dalston, at the bakeries and patisseries from early morning and at the larger grill restaurants at weekends. None of the main restaurants publishes its breakfast hours in a form we could read, so telephone ahead rather than turning up.
How much does a Turkish breakfast cost in London?
Our estimate for September 2026 is £15 to £25 a head for a full shared spread, which is comparable to a cooked breakfast in a central hotel and a great deal more food. A simpler version, a börek and a tea from a bakery counter, costs a few pounds.
Which Green Lanes restaurant should I choose?
For the grill, Gokyuzu at 26-28 Grand Parade or Diyarbakir Kitchen at 52-53 Grand Parade, both rated 5 when we checked. For dumplings, Hala Manti at 31B. For pastry, the Antepliler baklava shop at 47. All are within two minutes of each other, and the point of the street is that you can use several in one visit.
Sources
- Food Standards Agency - Food hygiene ratings for Gokyuzu Restaurant, 26-28 Grand Parade N4 1LG and 339 Kentish Town Road NW5 2TJ; Hala, 29-31 Grand Parade and Hala Manti, 31B Grand Parade N4 1LG; Antepliler Doner 43, Kunefe 44, Restaurant 45-46 and Baklava 47 Grand Parade N4; Diyarbakir Kitchen, 52-53 Grand Parade N4 1AG; Yasar Halim bakery, 495-497 Green Lanes N4 1AL; Selale Restaurant, 1-3 Salisbury Promenade N8 0RX; Petek Restaurant, 96 Stroud Green Road N4 3EN; Mangal II, 4 Stoke Newington Road N16 7XN; Mangal, 27 Stoke Newington Road N16 8BJ; Devran Restaurant, 170-172 Stoke Newington Road N16 7UY (checked September 2026)
- Food Standards Agency - The Food Hygiene Rating Scheme and what each score means (checked September 2026)
- Transport for London - London Overground lines and stations, including Harringay Green Lanes (checked September 2026)