FOOD: Buenos Aires Cafe, Izmir – ★★★★☆

2017, FAMILY, FOOD, IZMIR, LOCAL, PLACES, RESTAURANTS, TURKEY jason

Overall Rating: 4/5
Recommendation: Go!

Facebook Page link here.

Buenos Aires is a little cafe just down the street from our house in Izmir that opened shortly after we moved in. We met the owner one day as we were hauling an old toilet to trash… He kindly came out to help us. Since then we intended to go eat there but haven’t made it. This week we decided to finally try it and we were very glad that we did!

Catie and I were just coming off of the Whole 30 and were ready for some ‘real’ food! We asked the owner what was best to order and he suggested the Buenos Aires Burger and the Turkish Pizza. In my experience, it’s not wise to ignore order suggestions from the owner. We were hungry so I also ordered a side of onion rings.

The hamburger and the pizza were delicious! The hamburger, unlike a lot of other Turkish hamburgers, had a really good texture. This burger also had a piece of steak filet on it! The pizza had a thin, crispy crust that had a variety of toppings on it, including sucuk (a spicy turkish beef sausage), a type of pastrami (which may have actually been pork) and corn (which is not uncommon for Turkish pizzas). After not having pizza for a month, it was a great step back into the italian world.

The only negative thing about the dinner were the french fries. They were a soggy mess. While the flavors were fine, they had none of the ‘french fry’ texture that you want.  (*UPDATE: We have been there 2 more time since this review and the fries are our favourite thing to order! It seemed to be a one time mishap!) My hamburger came with some and our onion rings came with some too. (The onion rings were delicious but there were only 6 of time in a large basket of french fries — pro tip: more onion rings, less french fries!)

After dinner we ordered a Magnolia. Catie had seen it on the sign as we walked by day after day and wanted one. We didn’t actually know what it was though! As it turns out, it is banana pudding named after Magnolia Bakery in New York City.  We were served two kinds – banana/strawberry and oreo. Man… it was thick and delicious. I had not heard of it before but we may need to go the next time we are in New York or Chicago.

LANGUAGE: Did you hear that Turkish has two past tenses?

LANGUAGE, TURKEY jason

Turkish Language

Catie and I are currently trying to learn Turkish.

Yesterday in my class we learned that Turkish actually has two versions of past-tense. For those of you who may not remember from English class in high school, past-tense refers to those things which have already happened, which happened in the past.

Turkish has two versions of the past tense:

  1. The first version is for the things that happened in the past for which you have direct knowledge.
  2. The second version is for things  that happened in the past for which you have indirect knowledge.

If I went with you to the mall yesterday, I would use the first version. If someone else told me that you went to the mall yesterday, I would use the second version. Turkish literally has built into it’s grammar a tense for rumors.

This got me thinking if other languages have a similar distinction. It turns out that not only are there other languages that have two versions, there are some that have three, four, and even five versions of past-tense. It’s called Evidentiality. The most interesting one, according to Wikipedia, is Fasu which as:

  • visual sensory
  • nonvisual sensory
  • inferential
  • reported
  • heard from known source
  • direct participation

This blew my mind! To have different verb tenses for something you personally saw happen versus something you personally heard happen versus something you inferred happened versus something someone told you happened… etc … I’m glad I don’t have to learn Fasu.

Languages can be very interesting.

Turkish Language