Sehrli Tendir

A gloriously delectable Azerbaijani meal in the beautiful Old City

Address: Kichik Qala, Baku

It may have taken us almost three weeks, but we have finally delved into the joy that is Azerbaijani cuisine and I couldn’t be more excited to share this experience with you, my hopefully not hypothetical reader!

Once again, we have taken advantage of the week off the husband is getting for Novruz to go for a move-related-errand-and-delicious-lunch day out. We headed into a Post Office in order to register our phones (if you are new to the country, remember: all your mobile phones need registered within 30 days of your arrival, and if your phone is new or fancy you’ll also have to pay customs for it) and were extremely surprised to discover that the process was much faster and less faff-y than we thought. Faced with the unexpected prospect of a few child-free hours, we have decided to head to the Old City for a lovely walk.

The Walled City of Baku is a UNESCO World Heritage site of Outstanding Universal Value, and an absolutely unmissable step into the millenary multicultural history of Azerbaijan:

Built on a site inhabited since the Palaeolithic period, the Walled City of Baku reveals evidence of Zoroastrian, Sasanian, Arabic, Persian, Shirvani, Ottoman, and Russian presence in cultural continuity. The Inner City (Icheri Sheher) has preserved much of its 12th-century defensive walls. The 12th-century Maiden Tower (Giz Galasy) is built over earlier structures dating from the 7th to 6th centuries BC, and the 15th-century Shirvanshahs’ Palace is one of the pearls of Azerbaijan’s architecture. [https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/958/]

Once we managed to fend off tens of hopefuls offering you guided tours, we soaked up the beautiful architecture and wondered up and down its snaking alleys, peppered by shops offering souvenirs and carpets, and graced by many of the ever present street cats who doze on virtually every stoop and every low wall in town.

For lunch, we decided to head to Sehrli Tendir: Graeme had already been there with colleagues and had been raving about its fresh-as-can-be baked-on-order bread.

The restaurant is small but cosy, with colourful woven tablecloths which give the comfortable feeling of being in a family home. Worth noting is the stunning back wall: entirely made of glass, providing a close-up view of the 12th-century walls of the city, gunfire smudges and all.

The menu is extensive and intimidating for the uninitiated to Azerbaijani cuisine, so we pull a classic trick out of the bag (albeit one that always makes me feel awkward, I must admit!), and we ask our waiter to recommend a few dishes for us. It may be a tough move to pull, but it’s a good one to have at the ready, and one that definitely paid off at Sehrli Tendir.

As suggested by our excellent waiter, we start our meal with a delicious Coban Salati, a fresh and crunchy salad of chopped tomatoes and cucumbers with aromatic parsley and dill, simply dressed in olive oil, lemon, and salt. Fruit and vegetable are insanely delicious in Azerbaijan, and I love dill to an at-times concerning level, so this salad was definitely a welcome start to our lunch. We accompany this with a starter of Dolma, the Azerbaijani cousins of the classic Greek Dolmadakia. Dolma are tiny spiced balls of rice and lamb mince wrapped in grape leaves served hot with a fresh pot of qatiq, a very thick fermented yogurt.

Salad and dolma were served with the absolute highlight of the meal: an insanely delicious, golden, still-hot-from-the-oven flatbread, sporting a thin but crunchy crust and a pillowy crumb. This is a specialty at Sehrli Tendir, and it is easy to see why: stepping into the restaurant, the first thing you are faced with is a big stone oven that a smiling elderly lady uses to bake bread on order. They put so much stock on their delicious bread that, according to Google Translate, which admittedly it often is a little iffy on its understanding of Azerbaijani, the name of the restaurant can be translated to “Magical Bread”.

The meal continues as deliciously as it started with an incredible main of sautéed lamb which comes into a shared serving dish from which the waiter skilfully ladles us small morsels of meat, slices of peppers, aubergines, and potatoes, and small rolls of tortilla-like bread (which would be nice, but don’t hold their own next to the delicious bread we can’t stop nibbling on). The lamb is glorious and unexpectedly light due to the perfect levels of acidity, achieved thanks to the abundant fresh pomegranate seeds that are mixed into its sauce, which cut through the fatty flavour of the meat making this dish irresistible. The veggies are perfectly cooked. The sauce is so very yummy. All in all, a triumph!

We continue eating way past the point in which we are full and end up deciding against having tea after (a mix up in our order has caused us to order the tea for after our meal, as opposed for asking that it is served with our food, as it is typical). After our meal we are very grateful for the pleasant walk that takes us from the Old City back to Port Baku: absolutely needed!

Sehrli Tender was a beautiful introduction to Azerbaijani cuisine and we are grateful to our waiter for his excellent recommendations. We drank two (small) bottles of sparkly water and our bill totalled an astonishing 66AZN: definitely way less than I was expecting. Please note that they do not accept card: we luckily had cash with us, but it would have been an annoying faux pas to be caught unable to pay!

We absolutely believe this to be an unmissable stop in a foodie’s explorations of Baku and couldn’t recommend it more wholeheartedly!