Baklava Fit for the Queen

When you order the house special orange baklava at Kazan Restaurant in McLean, you'll enjoy a bit of royal dessert history. It's the same creation that Queen Elizabeth II proclaimed as her favorite during a 1971 state visit to Turkey. Restaurant owner Zeynel Abidin Uzun can attest to this, because he made it for her as a young chef at the famous Topkapi Palace Restaurant in Istanbul.

Uzun has been amiably serving the Washington area's own famous and powerful denizens -- as well as his more modest neighbors -- since 1979 in a soothing, airy space that outclasses its corner spot in the McLean Shopping Center. Kazan's menu offers plenty of tempting Turkish cuisine (try the pilic, with its spiced chunks of chicken, toasted pita bread and sauteed tomatoes relaxing in a garlicky yogurt sauce). But you'll want to eat responsibly for the signature payoff at dinner's end.

Uzun's baklava is unlike so many others. It relies on fresh, papery phyllo dough, slightly brushed with clarified butter and orange marmalade that is made daily in Uzun's kitchen; then it is rolled, loosely spiraled and baked until crispy and golden. It comes to your table barely bathed in a simple, non-honeyed syrup, accompanied by an accurate flourish of whipped cream.

The dish is easy enough to make, as a recent weekday afternoon demonstration at Kazan proved, but Uzun says his baklava can't be re-created using frozen phyllo dough ("You won't get the same results!" he warns politely) and gets too soggy if it is kept in the refrigerator.

A Turkish chef with a minimalist's touch makes a tray or two of the baklava for lunch and for dinner at the restaurant each day. But if you're a purist about the way you take your citrus, have the creamy kazandibi ("bottom of the pot") rice pudding, which runs a close second in Kazan's dessert hit parade. It is made with rice flour instead of whole grain rice and served in thin, flat, flipped-over slices so that the burnt bottom graced with cinnamon figures in your first bite.

Orange Baklava à la Kazan, $2.75, can be made in two sizes: three inches or 1 1/2 inches in diameter. Kazan Restaurant, 6813 Redmond Drive, McLean, 703-734-1960; open for lunch and dinner Monday through Friday, 11:30-2:30 and 5:30-10 p.m.; Saturdays, dinner only; closed Sundays.

-- Bonnie S. Benwick