Eat with your hands at this Turkish pizza restaurant

Eat with your hands at this Turkish pizza restaurant

The Pide is a restaurant that opened in April 2016 and located in Charlotte Street, close to Oxford Circus. Close to where Pide is, customers have a wide range of food. As the manager of Pide restaurant, Mr. Salih, a Turkish Cypriot, said that customers of this area are open to new tastes and he added: “They give the shop owners a second chance to stay here.”

The atmosphere of the Pide doesn’t quite make you feel like it is a Turkish pizza restaurant, but it has some little nuances that reminds you of the culture. When you enter, in the corner you see little mattresses around an end table that reminds you that you are home, or very close to it. I think, it has an atmosphere that appeals both to Turkish culture and the culture the restaurant located in. Mr. Salih said: “To be a modern version of what a traditional Turkish pizza and pide saloon was back in Turkey, we decided the concept should be like this.”

The manager also had some background information about what they are selling. In his research Mr. Salih found the word pide originally comes from the Greek word ‘pita’. Around 1730 Italians started to call pita as ‘pizza’ while Turks called it ‘pide’. When it comes to eating ‘pide’ at the restaurant, I have seen that the food varies from time to time. As the manager told me they change their menus every four months. Depending on the season, Mr. Salih said that they choose what suits best to that specific time of the year. I asked him if he could a pide, which pide would he like to be, he said: “I would change depending on the season. I would be pide with spinach and eggs on the top. However, in summer I would be a fried meat pide with cheese.”

Mr. Salih thinks that it is their fresh hand-made ingredients’ that make the restaurant so special. The taste of the food, I assure you, is incredibly delicious and no different than the ones I’ve had in Turkey.

Eating Turkish pizza, or as it’s better known pide, with a fork and knife is a struggle and neither appropriate or suggested. So Mr. Salih wanted to convey this message to his customers: “Please eat with your hands.” Someway or another, you end up eating with your hands because the food is so mouth-watering.  

The restaurant also has a wide variety of customers. But as Mr. Salih says: “We have a considerable number of Turk customers. I’m surprised to see a lot of Turks and often ask them ‘Where did so many Turks spring from?’. I didn’t know that there were so many Turks in London.” As a Turk living in London for about 4 months, I can tell you that after a time, everything starts to smell like pide, you miss it so much. Fortunately, I found this restaurant to fulfil my longing.

The service at Pide is quite nice. Waiters are cheerful and happy to serve you those delicious pieces on the menu and they are pretty fast as well. I think, the main reason for them being so quick is the cook Haydar, or as most of his customers know him, ‘The Pide Master’. He said that he learnt how to make pide from his dad. With his knowledge of Turkish pizza being made and eaten since 1420 in Anatolia, it makes him very confident of what he is doing and I assure you that he has the right to be so.

To conclude, as a person who is from the birthplace of the so called ‘Turkish Pizza’ and one who is hard to fulfil when it comes to pide, I highly recommend you to try this restaurant. You won’t regret. Not even for a second.

If you want to have a try, here is the address.

W1T 1RS