Birthday dinner: Caravanserai

Caravanserai, West End

This post is nearly two months overdue. We went to Caravanserai for my birthday dinner in September. After a surprise birthday cake at home, a couple of friends and myself went to this Turkish restaurant, located at 1 Dornoch Terrace in West End.

You will not miss the restaurant! The walls are painted in red, tables are lined with some traditional quilt work or designs and the hanging on the walls are some local Turkish/Mediterranean ornaments. Stepping into the restaurant, you can see an open kitchen and our table was facing it. Can you believe it that there's only one chef and one kitchen hand preparing food for their diners? That, I think explains the long service time we had that night.

Are the food worth the wait?!?

One of the tables in the restaurant

Caravanserai's Menu

We did not order any entree as we were quite full after having the birthday cake. It does sound a little weird that we had the cake first before dinner but apparently this is normal in Canada (I was told by AQ). :)

Finally after quite a long wait, our orders arrived:

Ispanak Borek - $26.50
filo pastry puffs with spinach and feta served with turkish salad and yoghurt sauce

Deniz - $29.50
Crispy atlantic salmon with roasted kipfler potatoes, fennel and toasted salmon almond salad
and a dill cream sauce

Kofta - $23.50
Herbed turkish meatballs, tomato chilli sauce on aromatic rice 
with garlic yoghurt, crumbled feta served with salad

Shish Kebap - $27.50
Chicken skewers char grilled, served on fresh salad, with house made tomato sauce
and yoghurt cucumber, side of garlic flat bread and harissa

I ordered the shish kebap. It was pretty good actually. The chicken pieces were really tender and were chargrilled to perfection. The housemade tomato sauce is really tasty too with hints of spiciness to it. Overall, the flavour combination was really good.

I was lucky that I managed to try some of the salmon and filo pastry puffs meals. The salmon was fresh and wasn't too dry nor oily. Adding to that, the salmon's skin was cripsy, which is how it should be. The potatoes were quite good too. 

On the other hand, the filo pastry puffs were equally good as the rest of the dishes. The perfect combination of the spinach and feta really hit the spot for me. It was delicious! 

Well after the main meals, we decided to try some of their desserts. The desserts have been sitting on the kitchen bench-top and they were really an eye-catcher, ready to tempt anyone with sweet tooth. :)

Combination dessert

Oh, I can't remember the actual name for this dessert now! Basically, it consisted of four different type of Turkish sweets: baklava, Turkish delights, chocolate coconut balls and coconut almond pastry. All of us managed to try each of the dessert (me being a Libra, everyone has a fair chance of trying! Hehe!). My favourite is definitely the baklava, one of the best that I have tried so far! The other two's favourite was the Turkish delight, I think that was a little too sweet for me. 

After dessert, MXM ordered an apple tea (hot) and JC had a chai latte. Hmm... the apple tea tasted like warmed apple juice to me and the chai was definitely not as good as the ones I had before.

Albeit the long waiting time, we had an enjoyable dining experience with good ambience despite the rickety floorboards when one of the neigbours started to move about. I think the food is pretty authentic but a little too expensive for me.


Food: 8
Service: 7
Ambience: 7

Ratings: 10: perfect; 9: excellent; 8: great; 7: good; 6: passable; 5: disappointing; 1-4: woeful