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Lezzet

Kylie Northover

Lezzet's welcoming dining room.
Lezzet's welcoming dining room.Anu Kumar

Turkish

Growing weary of scrambled eggs and avo for breakfast? Perfect for the colder weekend mornings, Lezzet's traditional Turkish breakfasts are hearty and warming, all cooked in the restaurant's giant wood-fired oven. The prices, too, are not your average brekkie level - coffee is just $2.50.

Owner and chef Kemal Barut cooks dishes from his childhood in Turkey, where he spent much of his time at his grandmother's house in Beypazari, near Ankara.

''I use the same ingredients and make-up of each dish that my family would dine on most mornings,'' he says. ''But we always eat indoors, from a really low table, in the centre of the room, with a huge copper dish about 80 centimetres wide on top. Everything except the tea is presented on that copper plate and we all just help ourselves from that - the sucuk, olives, everything … My grandma does a thick flat bread that's cooked on a hotplate, and after one side's cooked it puffs up, then she pierces the side and stuffs fresh butter into the centre and that just accompanies all the items. We sit around the huge dish, one person pours the tea and we all dig in.''

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The Ottoman: Scrambled eggs with sucuk, haloumi, diced tomato, olives and baby spinach.
The Ottoman: Scrambled eggs with sucuk, haloumi, diced tomato, olives and baby spinach.Anu Kumar

At Lezzet, it's as authentic as it gets without the low tables and the home-style decor - the sprawling restaurant is three shopfronts wide, seats 90 and does a roaring trade in the evenings.

The breakfast menu, served till 3pm on weekends, is a Bircher-free zone (although there's a fruit salad with yoghurt and fresh mint, $6.50) and even your basic toast-and-jam option is done on wood-fired Turkish bread ($4).

There's the Classic Breakfast, free-range eggs on Turkish bread (a bargain at $7) and Eggs Oceania - salmon and poached eggs given a Moorish twist with goat's cheese and date mousse ($14.50) - and two breakfast pizza options: spinach, with feta and egg ($14.50) and Turkish sucuk sausage, with tomatoes, basil and mint ($15.50).

Menemen: eggs mixed with tomatoes, baby spinach, feta and optional chilli.
Menemen: eggs mixed with tomatoes, baby spinach, feta and optional chilli.Anu Kumar
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But the most popular dishes are the Ottoman - scrambled eggs with garlicky, spicy (really spicy) sucuk, haloumi, diced tomato, olives and baby spinach ($12.50) - and the Turkish Menemen - three eggs mixed with tomatoes, baby spinach, feta and optional chilli ($12.50). Both are served in piping hot claypots, the eggs still cooking as they reach the table. A huge pile of freshly baked bread accompanies every dish, perfect for mopping up.

For those not into the concept of early-morning spice, there's the Turkish Breakfast - poached eggs, roasted tomatoes, sauteed mushroom, olives and feta on Turkish bread, $11.50 - while non-egg eaters are catered to with the No-Egg Breakfast, a simple dish of grilled sucuk, roasted tomato, wilted spinach and home-made tomato sauce ($10.50), perhaps the best option for the bread-mopping here. It's worth getting out of bed on a rainy weekend morning and rolling into Lezzet where the wood-fired oven is cranked up an hour before service, its warm glow hinting at what lies ahead.

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