West Houston Turkish bakery offers crusty, bagel-like simits and other sweet and savory pastries like poachas and achmas.

12315 Westheimer Rd ste d, Houston, TX 77077
(832) 486-9158
Website

6:30AM–4PM (Mon-Fri), 7:30AM–4PM (Sat), 8AM–4PM (Sun)

Following other food mavens often has us buckling up and hitting the town in search of whatever delicious thing just appeared online. When a photo features something that looks both tasty and unknown to us, we feel especially compelled to find the real-life counterpart. A tireless chronicler of the city’s dining scene, Houston’s Got Spice stands out for not only her well-composed, hyper-saturated photos but her predilection for eclectic international fare. On her blog, she compiles round-ups of various foods and beverages: places selling the best Vietnamese iced coffee, for example, or where to find desserts featuring ube, a purple yam. Her recent report on Asian and Near Eastern bakeries included a photo of something that, as fools for toasted bagels, we had to probe for ourselves.

 

Simit with Egg and Soujouk ($5.90). A simit is a hoop of baked dough, encrusted with toasted sesame seeds. Unlike bagels, simits are less chewy and more crusty. They also have a much larger hole. Simit & Poacha turns this lack to good advantage by offering to fry a sunny-side-up egg in the middle of their simits. We also ordered ours with soujouk, a type of Middle Eastern sausage seasoned with chile powder, garlic, and cumin. The sliced and stuffed simit was a bit awkward to share, but delicious, like a deconstructed bagel sandwich from a parallel universe—which it basically is. The egg was served on the very runny side, including the white, so if you like your eggs more cooked, you should mention that when ordering.

Sweet Tahini Simit ($3.95). Back when one of us was a Jewish kid growing up in 1970s’ Nashville, his mother used to buy blocks of the sesame-based sweet halvah at a small deli, which also supplied the family with kosher salami and pumpernickel bread. And the second member in our team had a mother who frequented natural food stores where she would pick up “healthy” candies like halvah and the much less popular chocolate substitute, carob. Biting into the sweet tahini simit revived these snack memories for us. This off-menu specialty tastes like gobs of halvah wrapped inside a slightly crusty, bready donut dusted with powdered sugar. In other words, it tastes amazing, especially when consumed with a thimble cup of good and muddy Turkish coffee. This item does not appear on the menu board, so we’re unsure if they have it every day, but they should.

Take-out bonus. We liked this place so much we grabbed a few snacks to go on the way out:

Mozzarella Achma ($2.95). The achma is a much softer, fluffier take on the bread-roll-with-a-hole-in-the-middle theme that Simit & Poacha works so expertly. This is more like kid food than the the simit (but in a good way), with mild mozzarella cheese baked in.

Chorek ($3.95). A crescent of dense, pie-crust-like dough, stuffed with a filling that includes chocolate, nuts, and raisins. We found it to be reminiscent of Mexican pan dulce.

Feta-Parsley Borek ($3.95). A roll of chewy, layered dough shot through with an ample amount of salty feta cheese and parsley.

Conclusion: Goddamn, this place is great. The prices will not have you quietly fist-pumping because you nabbed an extraordinary deal. But Simit & Poacha bakes niche items, saving you a flight to a some other city with high concentrations of people from Turkey. It is one of those establishments that underscores how lucky you are to be a food-curious Houstonian.