Pasha Castle

Pasha Castle at 3279 M Street NW brings the Turkish and Eastern Mediterranean culinary tradition to Georgetown’s M Street commercial corridor, serving the kebab, mezze, and flatbread preparations that the Ottoman culinary heritage spread across a wide geographic region through the centuries of the empire’s reach. The pasha designation references the Ottoman administrative title for a high-ranking official, and the castle name continues the Ottoman architectural and social reference that the restaurant’s identity draws from.

Turkish cuisine, which sits at the geographic and culinary crossroads of the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean, has produced some of the most influential food traditions in the region. The mezze culture, which Turkey shares with the broader Eastern Mediterranean, involves the array of small dishes served before the main meal that allows the table to sample the kitchen’s range: the stuffed grape leaves, the yogurt preparations, the eggplant dishes prepared in the many forms that the Turkish kitchen has developed for aubergine, and the legume dishes that the Mediterranean vegetable preparation includes.

The kebab program at Pasha Castle covers the range of the Turkish grilled meat tradition: the shish kebab of marinated cubed lamb or chicken, the adana kebab of spiced ground meat on a wide skewer from the Adana region of southern Turkey, and the doner kebab of seasoned meat on a vertical rotisserie that has become the Turkish food format best known outside Turkey. The Turkish pide, which is the boat-shaped flatbread baked in a wood-fired oven with various toppings that makes it the Turkish cousin of the Italian pizza, may also appear on the Georgetown menu.

The M Street address at 3279 is in the upper commercial block near the Georgetown University approach. Hours run from 11am most days and noon Sunday. The Ottoman culinary legacy that the Turkish kitchen preserves is one of the most significant in the history of food: the Topkapi Palace kitchens in Istanbul employed hundreds of cooks organized into specialized departments for meat, fish, bread, and confections, and the cuisine they produced influenced the food of the entire eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the Middle East through the centuries of the empire’s reach. The Georgetown customer who visits Pasha Castle at 3279 M Street is accessing this tradition in the American context: the baklava, the stuffed grape leaves, the lamb preparations, and the flatbreads that the Turkish kitchen has maintained through the empire’s end and the republic’s century are available in the Georgetown commercial corridor alongside the French, Italian, and American dining that M Street otherwise provides. The Turkish coffee tradition, which produces the thick, unfiltered coffee in a cezve pot that the Ottoman court developed and that has spread through every culture the empire touched, is among the most distinctive beverage preparations in the world. Served with the grounds settling in the bottom of the small cup, Turkish coffee is both a beverage and, for those who read the grounds, a conversation. The M Street address at 3279 is in the upper commercial block near the Georgetown University approach. Hours run from 11am most days and noon Sunday.