“Does the sheep’s head soup have a lot of stuff in it?” I asked my server.

Realizing that this was somewhat ambiguous, especially applied to a dish as laden with stuff as the brew of lambs’ snouts, ears, tongues, cheeks and eyeballs known in Turkey as kelle paca, I tried again.

“Is it very filling, I mean?”

My concern was a familiar one, to me at least. I was in Queens, at a new Turkish restaurant in Astoria called Lokanta, and the menu was so appealing that I wanted to try it all. Already I was set on a few bourekas, some labneh, the fava dip and some form of braised lamb over eggplant. I’d spotted another three or four dishes that I was probably going to tack on at the end of my order, as if by afterthought. I suspected that I could add a small bowl of kelle paca and still eat everything else. But a big bowl, one so thick with bits formerly affixed to a sheep’s skull that a spoon would stand up in it, might tip the scale.

The server pondered this for a while until a wiry man got up from his marble-topped table in the corner and conferred with her. Wearing baggy jeans, a white T-shirt and a baseball cap that kept his zinc-colored ponytail in place, he looked like a contractor, maybe a painter who’d come by to touch up the moldings and had been invited to stay for a Turkish coffee. Then he spoke to us about the sheep’s head soup.