We’ve seen bread served in flat caps and we’ve heard of bowls of American cereal sold for £5 on Brick Lane, but Murat dwarfs them all for hipster pomp: no menu, no waiters. Hell, there aren’t even any tables. But you can definitely get a good bit of scran for your buck.
The exterior is bright green with huge posters displaying the offers of the day, and outer panels bearing large photographs of the fweshest tomatoes, a pint of milk, and a bottle of Jack Daniels. All the essentials.
With no TripAdvisor reviews to go off, we entered Murat with an open mind. We thought an aperitif would be nice, so we bought a litre bottle of vodka from the huge selection of spirits stacked along the right hand wall: Zubrowka (£19.99), a Polish vodka distilled using the same methods for over 600 years using the aromatic herb Bison Grass. Hipster levels rising.
There’s a huge selection of starters from all over the globe, including Turkish, Greek, Cypriot and Arabic delicacies. We paced up and down the aisles for a bit, contemplating the virtues of pickled vegetables, and eventually settled on selected cauliflower in beetroot (99p), whole garlic and shallots (£2.89) and celeriac (89p) with a drizzle of cypriot olive oil (£2.99) and a squeeze of lemon (4 for £1), which was a brilliant starter. We also added in some stuffed vine leaves (£1.99 a tin) which were lovely and soft, with slightly sweetened rice inside.
The main course was the mother of all sandwiches. After selecting a huge, oval-shaped, still-warm Turkish flatbread (75p) and opening it up along its length, we spread it with Puck (£1.99) a salty, smooth feta-style cheese, along with thin slices of tomato and a few of the pickled shallots left over from the starter. We added a few basil leaves and some harissa paste (69p) squeezed from the bright yellow and red tube of joy. We only ate half of it, and put the remainder in our bag for the following day.
In terms of dessert, we can heartily recommend the baklava (£5.99/kg) which you can select from the glass counter. Yes, it’s basically 98% sugar, but who cares? We also grabbed a small bag of Turkish coffee (£4) to brew back at home.
Murat is a playground for the adventurous, and for around £10 you can get enough goodies to make several meals and wow your mates with your well-travelled palate and eclectic taste buds.
2 Gedling Street, NG1 1DS. 0115 924 2494
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