Feta cheese ice cream among Turkish street food flavours offered at Newtown cafe Hakiki

Date: 25 May 2015
By: Daily Telegraph - Sarah Sharples / Inner West Courier Inner City

DISHING up the kind of classic Turkish flavours you’d find on the streets of Istanbul, Hakiki in Newtown is Sydney’s latest cult ice cream spot. Opening just two weeks ago, patisserie Hakiki offers homemade ice cream and baklava, Turkish delights, coffee, tea and pomegranate and sour cherry juice. Owner Nev Bagriyanik grew up in Turkey and hand churns the ice cream every day, while his pastry chef wife, Zeyneb, makes the baklava.

The key ingredient in the ice cream is a wild orchid root called salep, which gives it an authentic stretchy texture. In Turkey ice cream is traditionally eaten with a knife and fork. The more unusual ice cream flavours on offer include grape molasses and tahini, melon and feta cheese, and apricot and walnut.

And for the less adventurous there are flavours like caramelised fig and walnut, hazelnut, sour cherry, pomegranate, baklava and Turkish delight.

Mr Bagriyanik said the odd flavour combinations weren’t the result of experimentation. “Every flavour we make is a dish eaten in Turkey,” he said.” We’re not making up flavours like bubblegum or cherry ripe or weird and wonderful names — it’s actually traditionally eaten. “Anyone who has been to Turkey knows of the ice cream street vendors — they are on every corner. Because the ice cream is so sticky and stretchy they can stick it on a cone and it allows them to do tricks and there are lots of videos on YouTube.” But for Mr Bagriyanik it is not about tricks, instead it’s about seeing the pleasure on people’s faces when they taste the treats.

“We get 50-year-old women who look like six-year-old kids when they’re in this shop — they get so happy and that gives us so much joy. We sell happy food,” he said.

Hakiki’s coffee is also brewed differently — cooked in sand and brought to the boil three times — with Mr Bagriyanik considering bringing in a fortune teller to read the coffee cup grinds once a person has finished their drink, as is tradition in Turkey.

He said he loved the diversity of Sydney’s inner west and that was part of the reason he choose to open his shop there. “Enmore is an up and coming area, economically the rents are more reasonable and there are nice restaurants and Newtown is becoming very much like Surry Hills, so I thought we’re in it for the long run,” he said. “Nothing is over $10 and nothing costs that much anymore. To have lunch and a drink it cost $15 to $20, but this is a treat and it shouldn’t be expensive.”