Baku After Dark

 

The Maiden Tower lit up for the evening, with Azerbaijani carpets for sale

I slept through the supper hour yesterday and I was not going to sleep through it again today. The restaurant that was highly recommended both by the food and beverage director of my hotel, and by my walking guide from yesterday, was Qaynana.

Traditional Azerbaijani cuisine on the Old City. And that means: kebab. And "kebab" means barbecue. Skewers optional.

Non-pretentious atmosphere.

My beverage was a pear lemonade. It was good, but it was so sweet it tasted like pear-infused cotton candy. Art cotton candy, I guess.

Prices were ridiculously cheap. Seven manat (about $4.20) for the chicken kebab. At that price, I assumed appetizer-sized portions, so I ordered a main dish.  Here was the chicken kebab:

That's a lot of bird. As is typical for chicken breast meat in other parts of the world, the breast had flavor and, more importantly, did not have the rubberband texture of chicken breast stateside. Seasoned red onion on the side. I was full.

But I had a main course coming.

Azerbaijani style fesenjan. I love fesenjan. It's my "go to" order in a Persian restaurant. The Mediterranean Cafe in Las Vegas makes a particularly tasty version.  Fesenjan is a stew made with chicken meat in a flavorful sauce made from pulverized nuts and a pomegranate.

 

 A couple of interesting things about this fesenjan. First, it was much more "pomegranate forward" than the fesenjan back home in Las Vegas. This is not good or bad. It's just an observation. It did make the dish sweeter. And the rice was served cooked in bread for some delicious starch-on-starch action. All that for 15 manat. In U.S. dollars: $9.00.  It was excellent but, unfortunately, not knowing what the portion size would be, I could not finish it. Ate most of the chicken, a fair amount of rice and sauce were left uneaten. No dessert, of course, even though I am 100 percent certain the dessert options would have been outrageously awesome.

So to walk off all that delicious Azerbaijani food, it was time to walk around the lit-up Old City Baku.

Turn a corner and run into an old friend:

The Flame Towers. Or, a Flame Tower. Lit up in green!

Shall we zoom in closer?

I'm going to go out onto a bit of a limb here, but if the bar/restaurant has the name "Sultan" in it, it's probably not authentic. Might be a tourist magnet, don't you think?

The lights on the Flame Towers kept changing. I was too slow to catch it when it was lit up with the colors of the Azerbaijani flag. But I did catch this:

Even the archaeology is lit up for the night:

And the day (and the night) ends at the Maiden Tower:

Finally, the jet lag is ebbing enough to let me experience Baku After Dark.