Haz St Paul's

Haz has been a very welcome addition to dining in and around St Paul’s. The food is keenly priced, but not at the expense of quality; hence, the restaurant seems to be perpetually busy. The staff are diligent and the service is rapid, leading to a high turnover but, at the same time, one never feels rushed.

I have visited the restaurant a number of times, and find it difficult to divert from the lamb shish, as a main course, because it is so good. That said friends who have managed to branch out to the rest of the menu have been impressed.

In my most recent visit, we were greeted with complementary glasses of sparkling wine – a nice touch. We shared some kalamari and taramasalata as starters, and noted the authenticity of the latter – not a hint of pink (food dye) in its makeup. On my prompting, our party of four shared three lamb shish kebabs, supplemented with one chicken shish, and we were not disappointed. As expected, the lamb had the delicious barbecue flavour and melted in the mouth. The chicken, too, was properly charcoal grilled and beautifully moist. These main courses come with vegetables and rice, and are a bargain at £8.95 for the chicken and £10.95 for the lamb. One of our party had a perfectly adequate chocolate cake with ice cream, but there are also a number of Turkish desserts available.

When I first visited Haz, it was with some trepidation that I tried out the Yakut (Kavaklidere) Turkish red wine. I now have no hesitation in ordering this wine, which is also a bargain (in City terms) at less than £14 a bottle.

I do love Haz but was a little disappointed on this occasion. The main reason being that instead of seating us in the main restaurant, without warning, they took us to a large unoccupied room where the loos were and sat us down there, alone, without any music. I asked for the music to be turned on to get the Christmas vibe going a bit. The food came out and as usual was lovely; our Christmas menus entitled us to loads of delicious and different starters with bread, olives and felafels and more. You get a choice of main course also and I opted for the minced lamb kebab with rice which was delicious. The atmosphere didnt improve greatly, even when after a whole hour a table of 10 was seated next to us which actually led to poor service problems. Out of 14 of us, 11 of us had already eaten dessert, when 3 had not yet even been served. The table next to us seemed to be getting all the top notch service, so it was rather disappointing although for £25 it is pretty good value still.