All is Fulya Love

A new café offers Turkish charm in coffeehouse form.

by Elisa Ludwig

With just two Turkish restaurants within city limits, we have a long way to go before our market is glutted with fainting priest dip. (That's eggplant to you.) So it is good news that the Ugur siblings, who opened Divan in Graduate Hospital (918 S. 22nd St.), have gone east to Queen Village with a new venture, Café Fulya.

Named after the sister half of the duo, Fulya has all of Divan's charm in coffeehouse form: wood floors, sleek black tabletops with a coppery fleck, clear red plastic scoop chairs and matching mosaic-tiled countertops embedded with a large glass evil eye for your protection.

I see absolutely no evil in the selection of hot beverages — traditional Turkish tea poured from an urn into short glasses, tangy apple tea and cups of strong, murky Turkish coffee with or without sugar. Of course, the usual array of coffee, espresso and matcha drinks found in Philly cafés is on offer here, too.

Turkish breakfast might be easy enough to make at home given all the proper ingredients. But there is no need to bother when it is assembled so beautifully here — a little dish of black olives encircled by slices of hard-boiled egg, tomato and cucumber, dried apricots, squares of mild Kaskaval cheese and a wedge of impossibly creamy feta (known as beyaz peynir in Turkey). This, plus butter and apricot jam, can be arranged in any number of combinations on fat hunks of ekmek, a Nigella-seeded round of chewy sourdough bread (also available by the bag at the counter).

In general, Fulya's edibles are on the light side — simple toasted cheese sandwiches; mashed eggplant with lemon and parsley swirled into lettuce; a delicate shepherd salad with skin-on slices of cucumber, red onion, ripe tomato (yes!), whole parsley leaves and more of that amazing feta. There's borek, a spinach pie of the puff pastry persuasion, with two layers of crust enveloping dark spinach cooked to an almost creamy softness.

The most filling meal here is the heavenly manti, which will be familiar to Divan patrons. Quarter-sized purses of dough are stuffed with ground beef or spinach and bathed in a silky yogurt sauce with peppery drizzles of olive oil and sprinklings of dried mint and paprika.

All the sweets — syrupy baklava, sugar-dusted horn-shaped pastries with raisins, buttery thumbprint cookies with apricot jam, a selection of milk puddings — are homemade and

lovely. There's also something called Turkish fudge, slightly more cakelike than its American counterpart.

Are these the beginnings of some kind of local Ottoman restaurant empire? Fine by me.

(e_ludwig@citypaper.net)

Café Fulya |727 S. Second St. 267-909-9937 | Hours: Sun.-Thu., 6:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 7:30 a.m.-10:30 p.m. | Breakfast $5.50-$14; Lunch/Dinner, $4-$9.50