Turkish fare gives way to Eastern flair

The little girl clambers up from her floor cushion and darts barefoot across a vermilion carpet. She looks to be about 4 years old and wears pink overalls with a frilled white shirt. In her tiny fist she clutches a dollar bill.

“Heeeeere!” she calls to the belly dancer gyrating in the center of the room. The dancer stops, curtsies and tucks the greenback into her sequined waistband. Snap. The girl’s parents applaud.

“The families, they come early,” says Mustafa Aytac, who owns Decatur’s Cafe Istanbul with his brother, Kamal.

But then, after the little ones go to bed, the late crowd descends. It’s an only-in-Decatur mix of Emory students, Indian club kids, CDC wonks and assorted hookah smokers. They splay over the drifts of cushions lining the four rooms of the cafe’s near-windowless warren. Aytac knows this weird coalition well: he assembled it.

Aytac (pronounced “I touch”) is a thin, energetic young man with close-cropped black hair and a beard so thick it seems to sprout a quarter inch during the course of a conversation. He had no idea what he was getting himself into 10 years ago when he wandered into Cafe Istanbul looking for a late meal.

At that time Aytac was a 21-year-old go-getter who had worked his way up from dishwasher to floor supervisor in a mere eight months. He and his brother arrived after the closing hour, knocked on the door and persuaded then-owner Kazim Firat to open the door.

Firat gave them a drink and unloaded his predicament. His wife, a CDC epidemiologist, had been redeployed to a field office. Firat had to unload the restaurant as fast as he could to join her. So, over a handshake, the Aytac brothers bought the joint that evening.

It wasn’t much: a linoleum-floored room with a few swags of fabric draped here and about to dull the fluorescent overheads. The kitchen was a shoebox that could barely fit one cook/dishwasher. The customer base consisted mostly of expat Turks and a few others who liked the roasted eggplant salad and the Turkish-style pizzas, called pide.

The Aytaces set to decorating. Mustafa and a buddy began covering the walls in murals —- one of village women kneeling on the ground and rolling out the flatbreads called gozleme, another of a sultan smoking a hookah.

By 2002, the brothers had taken over the check-cashing place next door, blasted open a wall, and set up their own real-life hookah den with floor seating, carpets and murals of arched palace doorways framed in bronze filagree.

They also worked to attract the large Indian clientele who come to this stretch of Lawrenceville Highway to shop and dine at Indian businesses. As ethnic Kurds who grew up in Ankara, the Aytac brothers know what it is to belong to a minority ethnic group.

Besides, what group of fun-loving young people is immune to the pleasures of lounging, dining, drinking and the sweet temptation of apple-scented hookah smoke? Before long, the belly dancers were undulating to Indian pop music.

The space kept growing, room by room, sideways into its minimall. The Aytac brothers gobbled up a DUI school and a Hindi video store, and replaced them with their ever-expanding party. They kept decorating, making it warmer, more evocative, filling every corner with something to look at. Enter Cafe Istanbul, and within a square yard you will stumble upon a soccer trophy as tall as 7-year-old, a framed picture of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, and a ceramic donkey with a chipped ear.

These days, groups of 6-year-olds run rampant through the space on Saturday afternoons for pizza birthdays. High school and college kids come later that night —- attracted by the unique mood of Cafe Istanbul, illicit on the surface (a hookah den!) but nurturing at its core.

Cafe Istanbul, 1850 Lawrenceville Highway, Decatur. 404-320-0054, www.cafeistanbulatlanta.com

jkessler@ajc.com