This dumpling reveals all at a Turkish restaurant like no other in L.A.

Los Angeles Times

11-03-2025

Kibbeh, the improbably delicate union of bulgur and spiced ground meat, is a shape-shifter of a dish. Its name adapts to languages and dialects throughout southwestern Asian countries; in Turkey, it goes by içli köfte.
Many of us know kibbeh best as football-shaped croquettes we crack open to reveal the fragrant, juicy-crumbly filling, but the combination of ingredients can take many guises.
Local kibbeh specialists like Kobee Factory in Van Nuys and Aleppo's Kitchen in Anaheim present several of the possible geometries: the familiar tapered spheres, stuffed rounds grilled over grates, a pan version etched with lovely motifs before baking, variations molded into cigars or rings, or served in carefully simmered sauces made from yogurt or a seasonal blend of citrus juices and tahini.
Amid all these possibilities, the one Okay Inak toils over solo at his 16-seat restaurant Sora Craft Kitchen in downtown L.A. is singular: He takes the core elements and transforms them into something else entirely, forged from family memories.
Inak grew up not far from Istanbul, though his mother is from a tiny city in southeastern Turkey called Bitlis. She made a specific variation of içli köfte called kitel, working ground bulgur to a smooth dough she would pat into palm-size discs, fill and boil. Intense amounts of allspice and black pepper flavored the meat inside. Inak said that she would spend hours preparing kitel for him and his father and brothers, and then grow annoyed when they wolfed them down without appropriately savoring her exertions.
But Inak did remember, and the presentation at Sora invites slow appreciation.
His rendition, which he says closely resembles his mother's, is essentially a large oval dumpling. The casing has yielding bounce. Spices darken and complicate the finely textured beef.
Plating borrows from the fine-dining playbook: The kitel arrives in a ceramic bowl cast in shades of milk and dark chocolates, sitting on thickened yogurt with drizzles of dill-scented herb oil, butter sparked with Aleppo pepper and a finishing tablespoon of meat sauce intensified with chile oil. It's soothing to gaze down onto the uneven circles and bleeding earth tones. The flavors convey the key meat-grain-spice triumvirate, but the dish's sum also brings to mind the contrasts in the saucing of Iskender kebab.
Though Sora is Inak's first restaurant, he has years of culinary experience, and it shows: The short menu plays straight to his talents and thrillingly conveys a clear command of the story behind his cooking. He blends autobiography, born of a locally underrepresented cuisine, and an intellectual creativity driven by curiosity for the world. It's an approach, when done well, that food-loving Angelenos recognize and welcome.
During his childhood, Inak's family ran a seasonal seafood shack in a tourist town situated on the Sea of Marmara. The kitchen called; his first adult gig was at a Japanese restaurant in Istanbul. (Sora is a Japanese word meaning 'sky,' or 'the heavens.') His wife, Sezen Vatansever, is a doctor and pharmaceutical researcher. When her career took her to New York and then Los Angeles, Inak sought out work at tasting-menu temples: Eleven Madison Park and Per Se in Manhattan, Mélisse in Santa Monica. During the pandemic, he drove a truck for a while. He joked in a recent conversation that every small town in America he drove through seemed to have three Italian restaurants and one sushi bar.
The couple self-funded Sora, which opened nearly a year ago and then closed for several months while Inak recovered from a hand injury. He handles all the daily operations alone: prepping, cooking, serving, cleaning.
'Hi, you're being recorded,' says a woman's automated voice as you approach the restaurant's door. The space resides on a fairly desolate, well-lit block with lots of parking. Her tone is cheerful to the point of ominous. The moment wouldn't be out of place on 'Severance.'
Any foreboding ends there. Walk into the tiny dining room, warmed with light woods and plants, and Inak looks up to greet you from the open kitchen. Place your order on a mounted touchscreen pad by the door. He'll gesture you toward an empty table.
At lunch, he serves a friendly mix of chicken and beef kebab bowls, falafel and fried chicken in pita punched up with pickled cucumber and pepper jam. It's solid sustenance, but dinner is when the bangers appear.
Look for corti taplamasi, a cloudy, red-orange soup made from cabbage fermented for three weeks, an optimum length of time during which the sour, salty tang hits peak deliciousness. The small, soft, hand-rolled balls knocking around in the broth? Leftover bulgur dough from making kitel.
The soup also pulls from Inak's mother's repertoire. The dessert called kirecte kabak is his father's specialty. Chunks of butternut squash (it would be pumpkin in Turkey) soak in limewater overnight. The calcium hydroxide creates an effect in that when the squash cooks, its exterior retains a thin, crackling shell while the inside melts to cream. I've had something similar only once, with papaya treated in the same way at a now-closed Oaxacan restaurant called Pasillo de Humo in Mexico. At Sora, the squash arrives nearly translucent, sweetened with simple syrup, splattered with tahini and flecked with crushed pistachios. It is incredible and a little otherworldly.
Focus on these dishes and you'll feel Turkish ground beneath your feet.
Two seafood entrees lean into showcasing more global techniques, impressively. A fillet of grilled branzino is all crisp skin and mild flavor, covered with a bed of soft herbs and gentle pickles. A hidden slick of nori chimichurri tastes as mulchy and garlicky and oceanic as it sounds. Yuzu kosho gives a bowl of shrimp some brightness and heat, but its deeper umami flavors come from butter ingeniously infused with tarhana, a paste of fermented yogurt and grains that's been made for centuries and is most commonly reconstituted as a soup base.
Easygoing staples can fill out the meal: hummus squiggled with avocado puree; a deconstructed tzatziki in which you swirl together labneh, cucumber and olive oil with hunks of pita; and a nicely seasoned kebab over oniony salad.
But I doubt you'll be rushing here for staples. You'd hurry to taste regional Turkish dishes you can't find anywhere else in Los Angeles, by a chef who also has a modernist knack and a roaming imagination.
Will his style continue to straddle two realms? Will his young restaurant tip more in one direction?
We'll have to show up and find out.