Yasar Halim

cakes and ladders

Living on the quieter stile of the Harringay Ladder means lots of trips along a rung to Yasar Halim. Now that I’m working from home more, my weekend rituals have begun to leech into my week. I’ve found that my autopilot route is the three-minute stretch from the flat to the warm beige bakery.

This bakery, annexed to its sister supermarket, was opened on Green Lanes in the 1980s by a Cypriot shopkeeper/businessman named Yasar Halim. Legendary in the area, he died almost three years ago and a very large framed photograph of him looking distinguished in a hat hangs in the bakery. The Parikiaki newspaper obituary reported that Halim had said a blind midwife in Nicosia gave birth to him in the bread tray, and that’s why he’s been working with bread all his life. I simply refuse to question this.

You’ll find any Cypriot and Turkish carbohydrate you can think of at Yasar Halim. Baklava of all kinds. Those small sponge balls that are ninety percent syrup and make my teeth ache just looking at their dangerous curves. And round and square celebration cakes, very white, the sides encrusted with chopped nuts, or the surface shiny with bright red viscous glaze, presumably some sweet berry flavour. They’re placed in big unwieldy cardboard boxes when collected. (A friend has confided a hope to have such a cake for her birthday, and I plan to support and enable.)

I’ve been a punter of the bakery for more than a decade. My boyfriend lived in a mad shared house off Green Lanes and I lived at the ends of Hackney Wick. I spent so much time on the small No. 236 eating Yasar Halim pastries. I’d pick up two in a paper bag on the way to the bus the morning after the night before, necessary after many Tyskies. It was the year I worked two jobs, did my MA and lived on supermarket bagels, compellingly synthetic flapjacks the size of bricks (usually topped with ‘yoghurt’) I bought from useful little shops at the university, and Yasar Halim goods. A diet of refined carbs, sugar and, in hindsight, some magic elixir of youth. I remember making my MA deadlines in some rackety manner, packing up the Hackney Wick flat ahead of moving, sitting on my stripped-bare bed and finishing David Nicholls’s One Day sobbing my heart out. I had written reams (very badly) on poetry that year, including one particularly iffy essay on some feted collection of love poems, yet nothing had moved me a jot as much as Nicholls’s emotional manipulation via romcom. My sweet tooth was more in use then. I could eat a whole Yasar Halim tahinli corek in one sitting no problem (though admittedly not the ones the size of steering wheels) and vast confections dense with pistachio paste.

But it’s the trays of savouries that get me now. Stacks of gozleme (you have to respect potato in flatbread), fat fried lozenges of lamb and chicken kofte, lahmacun beggin’ to be rolled up, pinched-end pides with spread egg and spinach or hunks of sucuk, simit rings as vehicles for seeds, long slabs of stuffed flaky pastry, sausage rolls with very slightly sweet bread, topped with a welcome afterthought of cheese, wrapped round frankfurter-like sausages (a handy hangover aid).

Your first stop should always be the rack where they’ve bagged up the items from the evening before, often in pairs – sometimes double the same item, sometimes a surprise combo – ready to be grabbed for a hugely reduced rate. You can get two items for half the price of one made that day. However, avoid the square boreks from this rack as these are ridiculously pillowy yet crisp when freshly made and warmed through. (Choose from mince with herbs – parsley I reckon – or spinach with flecks of feta. The best £1.29 you’re going to spend.) But pide off-the-rack is often fine, and the round boreks too – crumpled pastry with infinite nooks and crannies for mince to burrow. Spinach in the round is also great, the mix of softer soggy bits and more robust crusts. I guess it’s due to oil absorption that the spinach is oddly rich. All are better from the counter of course, but do not neglect the rack.

Inflation has inevitably taken its toll, though barely in the scheme of things, and it’s still cheap for the flavour and labour poured into everything. I see the Simit Sarayı across the road, and all over London, and think: Why are you going there?! Yasar Halim is here!

A few years ago, when living close but not yet on the Ladder, I was on my way home in need of a thing that would mop up warm white wine (probably) and went to pick up a late-ish snack from the bakery. An extra pastry was added to my bag without me asking – they had overstock – and I said no, no, you needn’t. And she said no, no, here you go. And I did need it. I remember it was like a great golden puffed up pocket bursting at the seams with sweet cheese. I inhaled it.