You know it’s going to be a good kebab when you cut the meat open and its juices are tinged an earthy red. I won’t declare that all the best kebabs have that reddish glow, but that is my private opinion. You see that color and you know you’ll be tasting the gentle fire of hot peppers.
Hot peppers from the Middle East are not as ferocious as their cousins in, say, the Caribbean. Aleppo and Urfa peppers share a certain fruity brightness to go with their hints of smoke and heat. Red pepper flakes are the secret stars of the Adana kebab, a ground lamb specialty from the city of Adana in southern Turkey.
Ephesus Bistro & Grill, in Rowlett, has a great Adana kebab. It’s a quiet Turkish restaurant open for lunch and dinner, with a full menu of kebabs, main courses, and real-deal starters. The dining room, painted an appropriate and calming turquoise, feels like an oasis from the suburban sprawl.
Ephesus is tucked into a strip mall between two arms of Lake Ray Hubbard. If you’re on your way to Ephesus and you cross a bridge, you’re getting close. (Note that this Ephesus is not to be confused with the Ephesus Grill on 75 in Dallas, an unrelated business from different owners, with a more formal menu and setting.)
The Rowlett restaurant’s chef, Erhan Afacan, has cooked in seven countries. He trained at Turkey’s oldest culinary school, in the small town of Mengen, and spent much of his pre-Ephesus career in hotels, including a resort in Sochi when the city hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics. His brother is a chef, too, as are two of his cousins.
“I was always having a dream to do my own food, take care of my own customers,” Afacan says. When he mentioned that dream to friends who had moved to the Dallas area, they were supportive. “[My wife and I] decided, in 2021, let’s go, why not do it?” So they moved to the United States, which he says lightheartedly is his “last destination, hopefully.”
The Rowlett restaurant opened almost a year ago, on Valentine’s Day. Growth has been slow, Afacan says, but it’s finally started picking up recently as the local lunch crowd finds it.
He also hopes that the Mediterranean angle helps to attract health-conscious customers.
“Turkish food has a lot of richness with spice, oil, all these things, but I changed my recipes a little bit to make it more light.”
For the record, the flavors are no less bold or vibrant after those healthier tweaks. To go with my terrific Adana kebab, with its tender lamb and gentle spice, I also grabbed a starter of “feta rolls,” what in Turkish would be called cigar börek. These are little cigar-shaped rolls of super-thin phyllo dough, filled with feta cheese and quickly fried. Afacan fries his in a pan rather than a deep fryer, and the result is light and delicate, especially when you dunk it in yogurt dip.
Both my appetizer and my kebab came with salads. Ephesus Bistro’s salads are richly dressed and full of a variety of vegetables: leafy greens, arugula, baby spinach, cucumbers, tomatoes, red cabbage, and shredded carrots. Afacan also serves healthful main courses, including a chicken roulade stuffed with spinach and mushrooms.
But even if you’re not looking to stay healthy, you’ll find plenty of big flavors to like here. You can sample fried zucchini pancakes—one of my family’s favorite foods, by the way—and move on to that spicy Adana kebab. Next time, I might order a gyro plate, with the meat cut and seasoned in-house. If you ever find yourself hungry in Rowlett, go to Ephesus.
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