Review: L.A.’s best Turkish cooking? Find it at this coffee shop’s kebab pop-up

On a recent Saturday evening in Santa Monica, under a white tent, the lone server at Lokl Haus Kitchen pop-up hurried over to our table carrying three platters of döner kebab.

He had whisked them from an adjacent building that serves as a prep kitchen for Lokl Haus coffee shop, less than 300 feet away. Casual passersby might never notice, but the two spaces comprise a rare Los Angeles County locus for excellent Turkish food.

Inside the kitchen, chef Hüsnü Kahramanoğlu stood in front of a vertical spit stacked high with layers of marinated beef shoulder, interspersed with marbled lamb fat cap to enrich the flavor. His right hand held a long, thin shearing knife to carve strips of meat, which he caught with the large wooden spoon in his left hand.

Lokl Haus Kitchen pop-up in Santa Monica offers döner kebab on Wednesday and Saturday evenings.

Our first plate delivered döner kebab bundled in lavash with pickles, tomatoes and slivered onions tossed with roughly chopped parsley and sumac. Each bite chimed with crunching and snapping. Alternating swipes through two dips, roasted red pepper sauce and cacik (thick yogurt mixed with diced cucumber), adjusted the flavors like a guitarist tuning strings.

The second variation rearranged the same ingredients into separate heaps over and around buttered rice. It was satisfying to taste the meat on its own this way: some pieces crisped and browned, others velvety, with the scent of white pepper lingering from the marinade.

Then there was Iskender kebab, the richest and my favorite. A buttery tomato sauce blanketed the meat, followed by an additional splash of sizzling browned butter and a generous blotch of yogurt. Cubes of fresh pide (flatbread) lined the platter underneath the beef, absorbing all the sauciness. Sliced summer-ripe tomatoes and a slightly charred green chile, prizes from the morning’s run to the Santa Monica farmers market, added freshness.

Halfway through demolishing our Lokl Haus Kitchen feast, Defne Karabatur nodded in appreciation. “This tastes like home,” she said.

Karabatur is an audience engagement fellow at The Times. She was born in Connecticut but grew up mostly in Istanbul, where her parents were raised, before returning to the United States to attend college at UC Berkeley.

Senem Sanli, the owner of coffee shop Lokl Haus and Lokl Haus Kitchen popup.

Poached eggs covered in garlicky yogurt and browned butter infused with Aleppo pepper.

“Where are the good Turkish restaurants in L.A.?” she’d asked me during her time working with the Food team. It was an excellent question to which I had no gratifying answer. Among our city’s culinary expanses, I’ve pinpointed little representation of Turkey’s vast cuisine.

A few weeks after our initial conversation, though, Karabatur heard about an under-the-radar pop-up, operating on Wednesdays and Saturdays, serving döner kebab and frequented mostly by Turkish expats. It turned out to be one aspect of a multipronged operation helping to fill in the gaps of our deficit.

Senem Sanli, also an Istanbul native, made her living as a local private chef before the pandemic. She and her husband regrouped after the shutdowns by opening Lokl Haus in November 2021. The tiny, stylish coffeehouse has one table, a window-facing counter and walls crammed with fun Pop Art prints in Santa Monica’s Mid-City neighborhood. Its menu reaches for broad appeal: various sweet and savory toasts and a granola bowl, coffee cake ribboned with cinnamon, a properly oozing grilled cheese served during lunch hours.

Breakfast at Lokl Haus coffee shop: Try the menemen, poached eggs in tomato and pepper sauce.

But the biggest draw are the Turkish breakfast dishes.

I’d direct you first to çilbir, poached eggs covered in garlicky yogurt and then doused in browned butter infused with Aleppo pepper (imagine chile crisp reconceived with dairy). Scoop it all up with sourdough toast and then finish what’s left using a spoon. Menemen, poached eggs in tomato and pepper sauce, brings to mind shakshuka but with a denser, less soupy consistency. Both are rousing in flavor yet profoundly comforting.

Two other creations circle tradition. A thick hunk of bread holds smashed seven-minute boiled eggs, the yolks still transitioning from running to jammy as they sit, with smears of labneh and muhammara and speckles of Aleppo pepper and black sesame. A plate that Sanli dubs the “self-care breakfast platter” also includes a seven-minute egg alongside cubed feta, mixed olives, chopped tomato and cucumber and little piles of dried fruit and walnuts. I like this for extra nibbling if two of us are sharing çilbir or menemen.

A Turkish friend kindly didn’t judge me for ordering fudgy, potent Turkish coffee, served in the small pot called a cezve, first thing in the morning. But she did remind me that it’s usually an afternoon beverage and tea is the more common choice for breakfast. Lokl Haus serves bolstering chai: tannic black tea boiled with cinnamon, cardamom, star anise and other sweetening spices.

Senem Sanli and her husband opened Lokl Haus coffee shop in Santa Monica in 2021.

Thick Turkish coffee for an afternoon beverage.

Inside Lokl Haus coffee shop.

Sanli originally leased the nearby commissary kitchen for baking and preparing other foods for Lokl Haus and for event catering. Missing the pleasures of carefully constructed döner kebab, she hired Kahramanoğlu and began the Lokl Haus Kitchen pop-ups at the end of 2023, setting up spaces for seating in the driveway in front of the building. She rounds out the experience with other flavors of home: Uludag Gazoz (mineral-water sodas in flavors such as orange and “mixed fruit”) and desserts like chocolate-drenched profiteroles and a variation of muhallebi, a lightly spiced rice custard usually made by long-simmering milk but which Sanli speeds up by using cream.

Even better: şekerpare, cookies made with almond flour steeped in orange-scented syrup.

Serving these same drinks and desserts, which are also available at the coffeehouse, the pop-up recently added a lineup of skewered kebabs available only on Sunday afternoons. Ruddy flakes of Aleppo pepper are visible throughout adana kebabs, a combination of ground beef and lamb shaped in an undulating pattern; shish kebabs are threaded with pieces of lamb or chicken. Kahramanoğlu mans the grill, the juices of the meat dripping onto binchotan charcoal and the billows of smoke sometimes engulfing him.

Peppers fire-roasted on the stove at Lokl Haus.

Pop-up döner kebab cooked on the vertical spit.

Senem Sanli, right, owner of coffee shop Lokl Haus in Santa Monica, prepares dishes with chef Hüsnü Kahramanoğlu.

We have similar, superb styles of these kebabs, their appeal reaching across great swaths of continents and cultures, elsewhere in the city: at Mini Kabob in Glendale, Taste of Tehran in Westwood and Saffy’s in East Hollywood, for starters. Lokl Haus Kitchen’s efforts are compelling particularly for the whole of their composition: The kebabs arrive on platters crammed with earthy bulgur pilav, a crisp onion salad, grilled tomatoes and peppers straight from the market and squares of freshly baked pide.

They hit their juicy, smoky marks, but I’ll nudge you to show up first on a Wednesday or Saturday for döner kebab. Between its distinct delights and Sanli’s breakfasts, we have glimpses into the balanced salads, marinated and grilled meats and myriad vegetable dishes that only begin to define Turkish cuisine. It stokes my appetite for more.