A Turkish restaurant in Penticton shouldn’t necessarily make total sense. Why not Vancouver or Toronto? The answer is part of what makes Elma so interesting. Walking along Okanagan Lake’s southern edge toward the restaurant, it feels less like you’re approaching a restaurant imported from somewhere else and more like one that has always belonged.
Floor-to-ceiling windows face the lake, and the clean, contemporary dining room is equally unassuming. There’s nothing kitschy announcing what kind of food is coming. It doesn’t seem interested in explaining itself before you’ve sat down. It simply fits.
Elma announces itself at the table instead, first through the staff. Our server walked us through the cocktail list with confident opinions, asking about our tastes, steering us off one pour and toward another, and explaining the concoction’s composition and why it worked. He seemed genuinely invested in making the table happy, a level of attention that extended throughout our entire experience.
Coming Home
That kind of hospitality doesn’t happen by accident, and at Elma it traces straight back to the people who own it. Ayse and Michael Barluk run the restaurant, and Ayse’s history in Penticton goes back further than the building itself. Her father bought the motel property Elma now occupies in 1978, and she’s lived here on and off since she was four years old. She eventually left for Vancouver, studied at UBC, and met Michael there. When it came time to think about starting a family, she knew she wanted to bring her life back to Penticton.
Part of that was wanting her daughter to have the same kind of childhood she’d had growing up here. Part of it was wanting to build something that was actually hers. She wanted to return to her childhood home and “set my own roots down while showcasing my heritage through food.” It was, she says, “a full-circle moment I never envisioned but was a true gift my father awarded us.”
Seared scallops at Elma – Image by Nicole MacKay
Turkish, Not “Authentic” Turkish
Elma nearly turned out completely different.
The Barluks’ first move was hiring a restaurant consulting group, and what came back was, in Ayse’s words, a “safe, tourist friendly food and beverage offering” — the kind of concept built for a town that mostly sees itself as a wine-country layover. It landed flat. They hadn’t left Vancouver and come home to open something that could exist anywhere.
Then came the “aha” moment: “Why are we looking to reinvent the wheel when we can lean into the warmth and comfort of Turkish cuisine?”
That answer became the restaurant, though Ayse is particular about the label. Elma doesn’t call itself authentic. It’s a small distinction, but a real one in a restaurant landscape where “authentic” gets used as a shortcut for “trust us.” Food doesn’t hold still at a border. It gets pulled apart and put back together by whoever’s cooking it, wherever they happen to be cooking it.
Karides pide – Image by Nicole MacKay
The Pide
The pide is the one dish that means something beyond the plate. Ayse’s family comes from Türkiye’s Black Sea coast, where pide is a deeply rooted culinary tradition, and some of her clearest childhood memories are set inside pide shops. “My favorite childhood memories are of Sunday brunches where many options of pide took centre stage,” she says. Families would meet for hours, eating, socializing, and catching up. Pide, she says, “was actually the first dish I knew without a doubt I wanted to introduce to future guests while paying homage to all those great childhood memories.”
A bevy of meze – Image by Nicole MacKay
Local Sourcing a Turkish Restaurant in Penticton
Even the restaurant’s name works two ways at once. Elma means “apple” in Turkish, and it’s also a nod to Penticton’s long history as an orchard-growing region. Ayse spent her childhood around orchards, farms, and vineyards, picking produce herself often enough to understand the work behind it. The relationships Elma has built with local farmers and wineries go back years.
Take this exact menu and drop it into Vancouver or Toronto, and it’s a good Turkish restaurant — maybe a very good one. Set down in Penticton, next to a lake, surrounded by the valley’s orchards where Ayse grew up picking fruit, it turns into something harder to categorize: a family’s food, reshaped by a very specific place.
Ayse puts the connection plainly: “We could not do what we do anywhere else, nor would we want to.”
The result isn’t an attempt to recreate Türkiye in the Okanagan. It is something more natural than that: Turkish food finding its own way to belong here.
Disclosure: This meal was provided as part of a media trip.
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