Taste of Breakfast Rivaled Only By Terror of Host

Many Turkish cities are known for something in particular. Gaziantep is known for baklava; Bursa is known for kebab. Van is known for it's lake monster - I'm serious, I have a picture. But I'm not publishing until I have more proof. I don't want to have another Phantom Menace on my hands. They should have never released that monster.

Also, Van is known for it's breakfast. Turkish breakfast is lavish, but Van is supposed to have the best breakfast in the country. Last Saturday, some friends from the English department invited me to breakfast at Bak Hele Bak, a very nice restaurant which, while we were waiting for the food, they admitted they had never been to. I'm glad we got to experience it together, because I'm sure I couldn've known from their faces what was coming.

I'm not talking about the food. Which, by the way, was glorious in a way that the sun is when you get really close, like a hundred thousand miles (at which point it will turn you into neutrons). Turkish breakfast comes all at once, on a hundred tiny plates, each displaying a certain type of olive, or a special cheese, or homemade honey. You just pick and choose; almost everything ends up spread onto bread, including the sausage and undercooked egg mixture (sounds gross, tastes like pure protein). I still can't identify the best part of the meal - it looked like a tortilla, had the consistency of a scrambled egg, and tasted like cream cheese. If you can tell me what it was, I will FedEx you a high five. Overnight. That will cost me more than the breakfast.

Afterwards, I didn't eat lunch, and I had some cookies for dinner and even had to push those away. "No more cookies," I said. "I am STUFFED. It must've been the cream cheese scrambled pancake."

But if my companions had been there before, I think what I would have seen on their faces would've been sheer terror when the owner walked in. The name of the restaurant is Bak Hele Bak, but the owner's name, Yusuf Konak, and his face appear everywhere the restaurant name does. Everywhere. Think napkins. He was on my mouth - oh no. I'm going to throw up. GET AWAY FROM ME KEYBOARD.

Yusuf is an older man who always wears a dark suit with a pink silk tie. I've seen the photos. He speaks no English, which I learned when he was yelling at me. Don't be alarmed - he wasn't angry. That's how he communicates. He came in the restaurant about halfway through our meal and began yelling like Samuel L. Jackson. Like an angry cop on the wrong side of the law. My friends told me he was actually asking trivia questions about Turkey - get it right and he would reach into his pocket and pull out ear rings or an actual ring, some tidbit. Then he would throw it at you. I was lucky. He threw a scarf at me. The others...some didn't make it.

He shook every single person's hand in that restaurant. And it hurt (you can see him here holding the shoe he later slapped everyone with). Later, when all had been quiet, I asked one of my Turkish friends where Yusuf went. Murat, my friends, pointed to a table where Yusuf was being interviewed by a camera crew. Local news, I asked. No, Murat said. It was a very famous program, actually, the equivalent of the Food Channel. Interviewing Yusuf. I said a little prayer for the show's host. If he was lucky, it would all be over quickly.