Hamdi brings hospitality, Turkish cuisine and whole lamb to Seattle

Despite crowds and hail, when Katrina Schult and Berk Güldal served Turkish food and whole roasted lamb to 1800 people over the course of three days on Bainbridge Island in March, they came away inspired to move to Seattle and work toward opening the restaurant of their dreams.

They arrived in June and immediately began a series of successful pop-ups called Hamdi, and there are just two more this weekend before they leave for Turkey for a month of culinary and cultural research.

The pair met while working at SingleThread, a Michelin three-star restaurant in Sonoma County, where Güldal rose to sous chef and Schult to captain, and Güldal previously worked at New York’s highly acclaimed Eleven Madison Park. But during his time in some of the country’s most renowned kitchens, Güldal realized he wanted to show off the food that he grew up with.

“People aren’t used to it here,” Güldal says of dishes like kokoreç, the Turkish thyme-flecked sweetbreads he serves in Macrina’s bui buns that he remembers chasing street carts of as a child. He uses his mom’s recipe to prepare the kısır, a vegetarian bulgar salad with pepper paste and pickles, and adapted the traditional gavurdağı salad featuring sumac, isot peppers, and walnuts, into a ceviche using fresh local fish.

While the pair had little connection to the city prior to moving here, they wanted to get away from the constant smoke and evacuations in California and fell in love with the waterfront city, which Güldal says reminds him a little of Istanbul. They came for the nearby mountains and outdoors, but they also saw in their March pop-up a city hungry for high-quality Turkish food that reflects the country’s traditional dishes. “We want to combine the new and old,” says Güldal. “The new hospitality, but cooking with the old style.”

Despite knowing almost nobody in town and needing very specific facilities to run their pop-ups because of cooking over charcoal, they found people willing to learn about what Turkish food can be. They keep hummus on their pop-up menu to give people a familiar entry point, while also showing off what makes it their own, by topping it with garlic confit and oil made from maraş pepper and serving it with chips from the lavaş they make from scratch and roll by hand. From there, they see customers return to explore the rest of the menu, like their marinated chicken wings with black cumin seeds called kanat and the juicy lamb kebap, made from hand-chopped lamb ribs.

“We use only male lambs,” Güldal says. Partially, that comes from tradition, but there is a reason behind it: “The male lamb has less gamey flavor.” When he first came to the U.S., the lamb meat here took him by surprise. Aside from their gender, the lambs eat the Turkish thyme trees, he explains. “We didn’t even need to season the lamb,” it just naturally carries the thyme flavor. By focusing on the male lambs – and adding in the thyme themselves – Güldal found he could eliminate the gaminess. The thyme Hamdi uses – and their peppers, sumac, cumin, and other spices – come directly from Turkey, to ensure they carry proper flavor.

This week, they will run their final two pop-ups before leaving to spend a month traveling around Turkey and cooking in the kitchens of family and friends, looking for inspiration both in the food and the culture, to shape their future restaurant. When they return in October, they plan to continue working with their group of potential investors to raise money and find a location, ideally in Ballard.

Hamdi will run its usual pop-up menu on Sunday, September 5 at Fair Isle Brewing from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m., but also has a special pop-up happening at Obec Brewing on Saturday, September 4, where it will roast an entire lamb — similar to the version they did back in March that led them down the path to Seattle.