On Bermondsey Square, a warm Turkish grill and bar named after the honey-soaked dough balls that end a Turkish meal
Lokma Turkish Grill and Bar carries a 4.5 across 2230 reviews, and it earns a close look from the Prat’s desk. The name is a small delight in itself, for it belongs to one of the most beloved sweets in the entire eastern Mediterranean.
Bermondsey Square (south bank)
Lokma sits on Bermondsey Square, on the south bank on genuinely ancient ground near the site of the medieval Bermondsey Abbey – proper survey territory, no disclaimer needed.
A thousand years beneath the square
The setting is quietly remarkable. Bermondsey Square sits on the site of Bermondsey Abbey, a great Cluniac monastery founded in the eleventh century that dominated this part of London for some five hundred years – a place of kings, queens and pilgrims until Henry VIII’s Dissolution swept it away. The monks who brewed and baked here would recognise the impulse behind Lokma perfectly well, even if the cuisine would baffle them: the feeding of the neighbourhood, the offering of hospitality, the small sweet at the end.
Hospitality on ancient ground
There is a pleasing continuity in a Turkish grill standing where a great abbey once fed pilgrims. Bermondsey has been a place of hospitality for the best part of a thousand years – monks brewing ale for travellers, tanners’ families crowding its lanes, and now a fashionable square of restaurants and bars. Lokma is simply the latest keeper of that long tradition, offering the same essential thing the abbey did: a warm welcome and something good to eat, on ground that has been feeding strangers since the Middle Ages.
What a lokma is
Lokma are small balls of yeasted dough, deep-fried until golden and then soaked in sweet syrup or honey, often dusted with cinnamon or scattered with crushed nuts. Warm, sticky and impossible to eat just one of, they appear across Turkey, Greece and much of the former Ottoman world, where near-identical treats carry near-identical names. In Turkish the word itself simply means “mouthful” or “bite” – a wonderfully modest name for a restaurant, promising not a feast but the perfect small taste. There is even an old Ottoman tradition of lokma being handed out to the public at moments of charity and remembrance, which lends the humble dough ball a surprising depth of cultural meaning.
The grill behind the name
The restaurant honours its sweet namesake by doing the rest of the Turkish table justice: charcoal-grilled meats, mezze, fresh breads and the generous, hospitable style of dining that Turkish cuisine does so well. It holds a 4.5 across more than two thousand reviews, a substantial and affectionate sample that reflects a kitchen which has won real regard by feeding its patch with generosity and skill.
Verdict
A 4.5 across two thousand reviews is a warm endorsement, and Lokma earns it on generous grilling and genuine hospitality. A Turkish grill named after a humble, honey-soaked mouthful of fried dough is the naming desk’s kind of sweet modesty – a restaurant that names itself not after a king or a conquest but after a small, perfect bite of pudding. Order the mixed grill, save room, and insist on finishing with the dish the place is named for.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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