Many years ago, as a student, I worked, very briefly, in a coffee shop in Middlesbrough. It was staggeringly badly paid, and mostly involved me politely asking passers by not to smoke in the doorway, while making coffee using a recalcitrant, Morris Minor-sized machine from the 1950s. The contraption made a pauper’s approximation of a cappuccino that had the colour, and often texture, of dishwater mixed with porridge. The café had a flat roof, and, with annoying youthful chutzpah, I remember asking the ageing spinster who owned the place if it might be a good idea to put some tables and chairs up there during summer.

Her incredulous response was simply to utter ‘roof’, with the same whimpered horror with which Lady Bracknell once exclaimed ‘a handbag’, before shuffling off repeating the word to herself sotto voce. She may well still be muttering that same noun today.

Those were primitive times, the late 1990s. Now, of course, unless the roof of a restaurant is thatched, sloping or entirely absent, chances are it’ll be accessible via steps of Eiger-level precipitousness or, if you’re lucky, a lift. Your reward will be a gazebo, conservatory or, in Yasmin’s case, a fully-fledged wraparound terrace, where you can eat amid the full majesty of brooding cloud swell.

Situated on top of the private members’ club, 1 Warwick Street, (although open to those without membership), Yasmin’s small interior is a sleek melange of marble counters, blancmange pink bar stools and dark woods. Outside, a hailstorm of pillows rests against banquettes with views over, well, not very much really. London’s jumbled, Roman and Regency street grid in this part of the West End – ‘a Los Angeles built for horses,’ as Jonathan Meades once wrote – means that my ‘vista’ took in a panoply of grey tiles, tired balustrades and lumpen stucco.

Chef Tom Cenci has been tasked to make the landscape of my dining table a little more exciting. Apparently inspired by his time travelling around Istanbul, his menu on my visit was a short one; roughly a dozen small plates of loosely Turkish origin, designed to be squabbled over by a large-ish table.

The Islek bun comes direct from the backstreets of Istanbul itself and translates as ‘wet burger’. The patty, soaked in tomato sauce and garlic, with excellently sinewy beef in the middle, was sensational; grungy, fatty, salty and designed to leave your fingers looking like you’ve just carved up a deer on a roadside at dusk.

I fancied some Turkish raki to accompany it, but was instead shown a wretchedly short and dull wine list, with whites limited to the usual Marlborough sav blancs, picpouls and gavis. More imagination here please.

There wasn’t a single wrong note on the rest of the menu, however. Charred flatbreads were the sepia-brown colour of a pub ceiling with just the right amount of crunch on the outside, and fluffy carby softness within. I plunged it into a plate of sesame seed hummus with golden raisins and peanut dressing, and swiped and wiped for all I was worth.

The sumac-smoked duck came as a circle of oval-shaped, perfectly-pink discs, arranged on a wonderfully agreeable and messy grilled corn salad. Elsewhere, the lamb rump skewer with pomegranate molasses was exactly what you’d want from a late-night meal near the banks of the Bosphorus. The meat was lined with unapologetic tide marks of fat betwixt the meat, which had the kind of pungent, earthy, smoke-imbued intensity that is found in Sultanahmet, but never at your grandma’s Sunday dinner table.

The lamb skewer was accompanied on its tray with a mushroom sister. Topped with a drunken drizzle of black garlic and mayo, the finishing move here was the use of za’atar – a spice blend hailing from Palestine, it looks like stale muesli but has a gorgeously lemony tang when roasted. It lightened the fleshiness of the mushrooms superbly, giving the whole dish a kind of fungi face lift.

Dishes are very reasonably priced, mostly between a fiver and £20. Though, if the budget is tight, you could easily just sip a beer while ordering three or four of the £6 bowls of batata harra potatoes. Looking for all the world like a bowl of smothered chicken wings, the spuds are given a luscious paint job with red peppers, coriander, chilli and garlic. As with all the best Levantine food, the onus is on making fireworks from sometimes frugal resources.

By this point, the English weather had taken on a chill factor that would have had a Shetland Isles fisherman scurrying back to his cabin for a jumper. The Ibiza-yacht chill-out soundtrack was starting to sound absurd. This was weather for a sea shanty, followed by something bracing by Sibelius, or any other gloomy Scandinavian.

Regardless of any incoming tempest, Tom Cenci’s food makes you forget everything you ever ate from a kebab shop in Clapham, and demonstrates that, when it comes to making the transition from traditional to urbane, Turkish cuisine is more than capable of such aspirational upward momentum.

Which is more than I can say for my napkin. The squall that blasted across the rooftop took it clean out of my hands and sailing across the Piccadilly skyline. If you find it, please be reassured. That red, sticky stuff is the remnants of a ‘wet burger’. No need to call the police.

1 Warwick Street, London W1B 5LR, visit yasminsoho.com

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