Mustafa Restaurant
866 Wilson Ave, North York, ON M3K 1E5
For a few years in the past, I was introduced to several different Turkish restaurants, courtesy of an ex who was from Turkey. A Turkish restaurant that always stood out to me is Mustafa Restaurant. They serve Turkish pizza, which I find pretty different from traditional pizza. For one thing, tomato sauce is not used. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any sauce used between the pizza dough and toppings. Nonetheless, Turkish pizza is very tasty and I will circle back to that a little later. The restaurant is located on Wilson, in between Keele and Dufferin, which is slightly north of Yorkdale Shopping Centre. If you didn’t know it was there, you might miss it. The first time I went to Mustafa Restaurant, it hadn’t been renovated yet. It has a really cool decor now, which makes it seem like you are in a cave. Their wooden wheel chandeliers are also neat.
Mustafa Restaurant has been on my list to write a blog post about for a while, but I didn’t have any photos so I convinced my husband to go there for lunch after we went to Toronto Premium Outlets last weekend. I was even allowed to do all the ordering. 🤯 (Note: If you ask for water, they bring you bottled water so if you are going to pay for your drink anyways, you might want to order something else.) We were served some garden salad with feta cheese and a light, creamy dressing while our pizzas were being made. It was a good salad.
I had ordered the Lahmacun and Karisik pizzas so that my husband could try one without cheese and one with cheese. Yup, some Turkish pizzas don’t have sauce or cheese… The Lahmacun pizza is the one without either. Instead, it has ground beef blended with peppers, onions, and tomatoes on top of really thin crust dough. It was served with a lemon slice, parsley, sliced and seasoned onions, and small green hot peppers on the side. I was taught to squeeze the lemon onto the pizza, place the parsley and onions on top, fold the slice in half to eat it, and then have a small bite of the hot pepper. They used to serve the pizza with the larger green hot peppers that are less spicy; the small ones are VERY spicy. The Lahmacun pizza was nicely flavoured and is the one I usually order. The Karisik pizza has cheese on it and is an assorted arrangement of their best pides. The toppings that came on ours were feta, ground beef, Turkish sausage, mozzarella, chicken, and beef. I liked all of them.
We were stuffed after our meals even though we only ate about half of each pizza. I was a little disappointed that we didn’t get a chance to order any of their desserts, which are also tasty. Oh well…next time I guess. 😉
