Eating in İstanbul

There are two things that you can expect with almost any meal or snack in Turkey: bread and çay (Turkish tea). The bread is delicious, a cross between crusty and soft, and sometimes having sesame seeds on top or black olive pieces baked in. Otherwise, Turkish cuisine (to my knowledge and experience thus far) is very diverse. There are lots of vegetables and they're always deliciously cooked and spiced. The meat is also amazing. We've been warned against street food, such as döner (the chicken or beef on a vertical spit that is carved for sandwiches and wraps), but we've been adventurous a few times - it's too delicious looking to pass up! Here is a look at a street restaurant that a few of us visited on our second day in the Old City (Sultanahmet).  This is a woman making the wraps - that black dome on the floor is where she was frying the wraps. She would wrap them around a rolling pin and beat them against the table, then fry them. They were so good!

And here is the döner,  this one was chicken. The man would turn it slowly until it was sufficiently cooked, and then shave it off to get it ready for sandwiches. 

Here is the wrap! The chicken is wrapped with tomatoes and lettuce, then grilled. The cups had fresh pomegranate juice - squeezed right in front of us. It was so fresh and so good. In total the meal was 7,50 Turkish Lira, about $4. Crazy good and crazy cheap? I'm in.

Often times with lunch is served Ayran, a drink of yogurt, whipped with salt and water. Although it sounds really gross, it's really hearty and protein-filled. I think it would probably make a really good breakfast. The initial sip is very surprising, but it gets better. Here's what it looked like. 

One of my favorite parts of the first week was a brunch in the town of Garipçe, relatively close to Sarıyer, but on the end of the Bosphorus. We had çay, of course, and ate a normal Turkish breakfast/brunch of vegetables, bread, cheeses, spreads and a scrambled egg dish (menamen). It was delicious. We all agreed that the clotted cream and honey on bread (balkaymak) was by far the most delicious thing we'd eaten since arriving. Since that day, we've made a bunch of brunch trips (say that 10 times fast). It's quickly becoming the favorite meal of all the exchange students. Here is a photo from a different brunch that we went to the next weekend, in Rumelifeneri, a town near Sarıyer. 

So delicious! 


Another one of our food adventures included trying a few restaurants recommended by the Lonely Planet İstanbul app on my iPod. The restaurant we tried in Taksim, Haci Abdullah, was amazing and fairly reasonable. It's where we went for my birthday, and we had lamb roasted with eggplant, cucumbers in yoghurt, gozleme (a fillo-dough like bread that's wrapped around feta and baked), and rice-stuffed grape leaves. All of it was amazing and beautiful, but I forgot to take a photo! So I will supplement with this photo of our lunch in Asia at another Lonely Planet-recommended restaurant, called Kanaat Lokantası. I had beef and eggplant kebap (at the bottom of the photo), and there's also meatballs (köfte) and roasted chicken in the picture. It was all delicious. The portions are always huge, and you often can't even finish half of the dish. 

Aside from tea and bread, dessert is the next most popular food in Turkey. At least, that is my guess. There are pastries and baklava everywhere - and it is all displayed artistically. I don't have a ton of photos of the displays, but Turkish delight (lokum) is meticulously stacked in high mounds, and each baklava piece is carefully decorated and cut, then displayed in huge pans. Here is a photo of Paşafırını - my new favorite çay and pastry place in Sarıyer. It's not a great photo, but you get the idea. 

Here is a photo of some treats we tasted on our second day in Sultanahmet. We stopped for çay and the waiter just brought us a bunch of plates to try. 

The top left is chocolate baklava (so good) and then birds nests filled with cashews, pistachios, and hazelnuts. Below that are 10 kinds of lokum - my favorite was hands down the hazelnut. Finally, on the right, there is a honey-soaked cake. Everything was amazing (I know, that's the 734th time I've said that in this post, but it really is!) 


One of the weirdest food items that I've found is this traditional dessert. It's a thick, creamy pudding made with (drum roll please...) chicken! One of the girls in our group ordered it and we all took a bite. It was alright, but too gluey for my taste, and I couldn't really get over the fact that it had chicken in it - even if there's not much of a chicken taste.

In Turkey, waffles are really only eaten for dessert. This one was stuffed with fruit - bananas, strawberries and kiwi - chocolate chips, bavarian cream and drizzled with melted chocolate. This is how every waffle should be eaten.

Just a few more food related points! This is mantı - Turkish ravioli. It's stuffed with ground beef or lamb and then boiled and covered in yoghurt and spices. It was alright, but not my favorite thing. I forgot to snap a photo of it before I started eating, but it is so beautiful. The spices are so colorful against the white yoghurt. 

The day after the Super Bowl, we decided to honor the occasion by finding wings (even though the Pats lost - I think my dad's still in recovery...). Our mentors brought us to the one restaurant that serves wings in the area and we dug in. Rather than blue cheese or ranch dressing, they're served with cucumber and yoghurt - sort of like Greek tzatziki. Here they are: 

İstanbul is full of open-air markets for everything. Beautiful fruit, nuts, tea, and fish (maybe not beautiful, but they're there) displays are everywhere. Here is a photo of nuts and dried fruit at one of the food bazaars. 

Finally, we had a cooking lesson last Friday. We made Kısır, a barley dish with tomato and herbs, as well as Gozleme, a feta and herb-stuffed pastry. We used the campus kitchen to cook, so we had to wear hair nets and booties on our feet - it was all very attractive! Here is (left to right) Trae, Emily, Amy and Junior filling and folding the gozleme. 

And this is the gozleme frying on the griddle. It is SO hard to flip without breaking, but we only broke one of the 15 pieces!

If you read Turkish, here is the kısır recipe!

That's the kısır - you cook the barley and then add oil, tomato paste and chili pepper. Finally, you add fresh mint, parsley and other herbs right before you serve. You eat kısır warm, using a piece of iceberg lettuce like a scoop. It's warm, fresh, crisp and delicious. I can't wait to try making it on my own!

Here we are serving it up - you eat the gozleme by tearing off pieces with your hands. 

I know this was long, but there's been so much good food! Rest assured, between the prices and quantity, if you visit İstanbul, you will never, ever, go hungry.