Zara Forest Grill Is Worth the Trip to Staten Island

A few Saturday mornings ago, I made a grievous logistical error. There was a half-marathon in Brooklyn, where I live, and it was pouring rain. And yet I packed my entire family into our station wagon and set out for Staten Island: I had a reservation at a new Turkish restaurant, Zara Forest Grill, and a little traffic wasn’t going to stand in my way. The G.P.S. estimated forty-five minutes. An hour later, we’d barely gone a mile.

Even in the best circumstances, a trip to Staten Island from any other borough is a commitment, a decent journey by bridge or boat. For Zara Forest Grill, in Graniteville, which is closer to New Jersey than Manhattan, it’s a commitment I’m willing to make. The following Monday, I went for breakfast, stayed for lunch, and left with enough takeout for dinner; who knew when I’d get back again?

Many of the dishes here are also available at the owner’s first restaurant, Zara Cafe & Grill, on Hylan Boulevard. But the new place, which opened in March, is much larger, in a building vacated by a Perkins pancake house. Though the dining room has been thoughtfully renovated, with wood beams and banquettes upholstered in fabric reminiscent of a Turkish rug, it still bears the aura of a diner, with a big, broad menu that includes avocado toast and chicken piccata.

Happily, the expanded menu includes more Turkish food, too. For breakfast, there is gozleme, a flaky flatbread folded around potato, spinach and cheese, or ground meat, and menemen, a curdy scramble of eggs, tomatoes, and peppers. A breakfast platter comes with a traditional spread: fanned tomato and cucumber; salt-cured olives; assorted cheeses; tiny links of beef salami, their ends split like tulip petals; honey, cherry jam, and clotted cream; warm pita; a small, puffy, crisp-edged omelette; and a pot of strong coffee or black tea.

Lunch and dinner are best begun with the balon bread, a shiny blimp speckled in sesame seeds which exhales a gust of hot air when you tear off an end, to swipe through meze, such as a luscious labneh hiding crunchy walnuts in its depths, or aci ezme, a coarse and spicy mix of bell peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, walnuts, parsley, and chili flakes. Standouts among the entrées include the Iskender kebab, which the menu describes as the “most popular dish of Turkish cuisine”: glistening shavings of perfectly seasoned lamb gyro are dressed in tomato sauce, piled atop silky yet crispy nubs of “butter-roasted bread” (a phrase I haven’t been able to get out of my head), and served with tangy yogurt.

The chicken gyro, made from thighs spiced with orange peel and oregano and wrapped around the spit, is just as good; get it to go and the meat is packed on top of silky rice pilaf, soaking it in delicious fat. For the ali nazik, a smoky eggplant purée is whipped with labneh and heavy cream, then topped with cubes of garlicky marinated beef shish kebab and a brown-butter-and-paprika sauce. For the indecisive, there’s the Zara Mix Grill, a mountain of both lamb and chicken kebab, beef shish kebab, adana kebab—logs of ground lamb or chicken—and ground-beef patties known as kofte, accompanied by pilaf, salad, and bread.

At the end of the meal, it’s worth waiting the fifteen minutes it takes the kitchen to prepare the spectacular kunefe—a nest of twiggy shredded phyllo dough that is crisped in clarified butter, layered with cheese, and then flipped, bathed in a honey syrup, and finished with crushed pistachio. And don’t miss the kazandibi, which translates to “bottom of the pan”: neat squares of a wobbly, cornstarch-thickened milk pudding with a skin bronzed from the heat of the stove and further burnished with cinnamon—rich, creamy, and cool. (Dishes $7-$40.) ♦