Istanbul

 

Thanksgiving in Istanbul

It’s only an hour-long flight to Asia from Sofia. Neither Mikel nor I had ever been to Turkey, and the only place in the Orient where I had been was Sri Lanka (Mikel has lived in both China and Indonesia). Thanksgiving in Istanbul seemed to us the perfect, easy, exotic getaway for a few days. The only problem? Four days is hardly enough time to scratch the surface of this fascinating ancient city that straddles two continents. I rarely tweak my photos very much before posting them, but my manipulation of the mosque image, above, better conveys the mysterious, other-worldliness of this great city on the Bosphorus. The city’s layers and layers of civilization, I’m sure, have been often compared to the rich strata of baklava that is ubiquitous throughout the region, but it’s a good analogy. Like baklava, Istanbul has elements of the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. Roman emperors, the Genoese, and Ottoman sultans all ruled for centuries. World War I effected modern day Turkey, a member of NATO with aspirations to join the EU. With 15 million people living in Istanbul, which is no longer the capital, it is a truly multicultural, world-class city, with efficient rapid transit (including continual ferries across the waters), fascinating historical sites, and some of the best food I’ve ever eaten.

We rented a penthouse apartment in Sultanahmet, in the heart of the Old City. Our rooftop deck overlooked the Small Haghia Sofia (mosque), just a couple of blocks from the Sea of Marmara, and a couple of blocks from the Blue Mosque. We spent four days mostly just meandering around the alleyways and boulevards. The array of street foods is captivating, and we marveled at how inexpensive fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice was. Our friend Tom Sietsema, who is the restaurant critic for the Washington Post, had been to Istanbul earlier in the year, and had paved some paths for us, particularly with the gang at Istanbul Eats, whose culinary walk through the Old City we booked for the day after Thanksgiving. Tom covered the tour in depth in his Postcard from Tom: Istanbul article back in July, so I’ll try not to repeat what he said. The tour hasn’t changed.

Lokum, or Turkish Delight, really is everywhere. That and baklava. And dried fruits. We kept wondering how on earth anyone could stay in business — and not just in the candy shops and stalls, but everywhere — hundreds and hundreds of stores that sell nothing but, say, brooms and dust bins, or nothing but socks, or nothing but sweatshirts. My only guess is that with 15 million people, plus 10 million tourists each year, there’s a shop for everyone.

We arrived on Wednesday night and got a good night’s sleep before we began pounding the pavement on Thanksgiving day. We had no plan, but it wasn’t long before we could stand the call of food no longer, and we wandered through the arches of this old Ottoman han — a complex of warehouses with a central courtyard — looking for the Vezir esnaf lokantasis (“working man’s restaurant”), which we had had recommended to us.

The hans were an important part of Ottoman culture. They began as inns along the east-west trade routes. Typically, the buildings were two or three stories built around a square central courtyard. Large doorways allowed horses and camels packed with goods to enter, but doors were shut at night. A tavern and stalls for animals were below, and rooms for rent above. Travelers could rest, eat, and do business. There was typically a mosque in the center of the courtyard, paid for by the workers’ guilds. Eventually, the hans became more like warehouses for the goods of the particular guild that predominated. As the city grew, those trades spread out into the streets, and the streets were named for the guilds — the scale maker’s street, the rug maker’s street, the blacksmith’s street, etc. To this day, the streets of the Old City are, for the most part, dedicated to one or two types of business. We even walked on a street that was almost entirely filled with barbershops!

Vezir restaurant is nothing to look at, and the food is nothing fancy. We began, as one is wont to do in Istanbul on a chilly day, with lentil soup. Delicious.

Vezir has a loyal clientele, so we were advised to arrive early. The chef prepares what he thinks will be enough food for the day, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. When you enter, you walk past the steam table and order from the chef himself. It being Thanksgiving, we went for the turkey. How could we not have? (And in Turkey, no less!)

And the overcooked green beans, of course! I was starting to feel right at home!

We knew we would be walking all day and that we would be going out for a fine dinner that night, so we purposely kept it simple at lunch. It’s a good thing we did, for dinner was not to be believed! 

 

Long before the dinner hour, we visited three mosques, our guidebooks in hand, reading aloud the astonishing bits of local history, but always aware of the omnipresence of food. After visiting the famous mosque, the Hagia Sofia (photo on the left, below), I noticed the marbleized halvah in a shop (below, right). Not just a coincidence.

 

Food is everywhere, not just in the market areas. Restaurateurs stand outside on the sidewalk and all but chase you down the street to coerce you to come in and eat. Rule Number One: NO EYE CONTACT! Rule Number Two: Don’t eat in a place that is begging you to come in! Though I love to discover places myself, in such an enormous and exotic place as Istanbul, it’s foolish not to take the advice of other professionals when it comes to eating. In one very touristy section of town, we were walking down a pedestrian street filled with outdoor seating on both sides. The hawkers were very pushy except at one restaurant, where the maitre d’ was cleaning the windows. I turned around and noticed that he had a sandwich board out that showed the many guidebooks, newspapers, and magazines that had recommended the place. We sat down and had a delcious meal. I do NOT, however, pay any attention whatsoever to the public, unmonitored postings on such sites as TripAdvisor. We have had crumby lodging in places that we later went back and saw were raved about (by the owner’s relatives?) on TripAdvisor. And we’ve seen downright cruel restaurant “reviews” that always seem to me to be written by disgruntled former employees or jilted boyfriends. On the other hand, I do listen to Tom Sietsema, because I know how he works — visiting a restaurant anonymously at least three times before he writes a critical review. If he says a place is good, it probably is.

 

You would be hard-pressed to escape food in Istanbul if you tried. There are street vendors everywhere, and there are oranges for sale in the shop you have to go through to get to what you’ve been told is the best lighting store.   

Tea is delivered all over the city, at all times of day, but if it’s lunchtime, you’re bound to smell fragrant trays of foods passing by you before you see them in the madness that is the streets.

People set up stands in the middle of the sidewalk to sell you mussels on the half-shell (photo on left, below). There are elaborate carts and simple wooden wheelbarrows offering culinary delights. Some of the foods are somewhat familiar, such as the doners sold in the stand behind the mussel vendor (a doner is what we would call a gyro: both words mean “to spin”). Others are downright bizarre-sounding and, frankly, -tasting as well. Take Salgam suyu, for example: dark turnip juice, very salty and very vinegary (and full of minerals and Vitamin C). The vendor in the fancy cart down on the waterfront in front of the Spice Market (middle photo, below) was selling just that — and pickles. I don’t know of a single culture that doesn’t have some type of ring of dough that is popular, but nowhere have I seen people line up for such plain fare as simits — the sesame-seed-topped, bagel-like roll that is as common as the chestnut roasters that you find at this time of the year on streets from London to, well, Istanbul (photo on right, below).

 

 

We knew we would be traipsing through alleyways and the rabbit warrens that are the market areas of the Old City the next day, and we had been walking all day long on Thanksgiving Day, so we decided we wanted white tablecloths and a relaxing meal with really good food for dinner. Without reservations, we strolled down along the waterfront inside the old citadel wall to the Cakurtaran/Ahirkapi section of the neighborhood where the charming Giritli Restoran is housed in a restored, grand 19th century home. Across the street is a lovely garden room where the mostly local clientele dine under trees and twinkling lights when the weather is warm. At 100 lira ($70) per person, it is described by several guidebooks as a “splurge,” but there is unlimited food and drink (they keep your water glasses filled as well as your choice of wine, beer, or raki). And what a lot of wonderful food it is! Inspired by her ancestors, Chef Ayse Senilay recreates the foods of her native Crete, typically serving two dozen different dishes of her fish- and herb-based cuisine. (“Giritli” means Cretan.) The first that is brought to the table is perhaps her most famous, the “seafood rice zeytinyagli,” or seafood rice (it’s actually orzo) cooked in olive oil, about which the folks at Istanbul Eats say they “really get worked up for.” (Sorry for the poor quality of the photos here. The dish is pictured at left.) Chef Senilay says that she “open[s] the ceremony with this…[to] prepare your stomach for the spirits! Then we have at least 12 tasting dishes.” The night we were there, 17 meze — appetizers — were brought to the table, and they were just what the doctor (I had a cold!) ordered! There were four types of greens — purslane, black cabbage, baby white cabbage, and radish greens. There was raw — pickled, that is — fish, not unlike ceviche. There was a salad of gigante beans and a puree of favas. There were pickled beets and cucumbers, a delicious eggplant salad, and a potato dish with an enormous depth of flavor not usually associated with those tubers. There were mushrooms and peppers, a pepper and tomato spread, and two dishes of fresh cheeses, including one made with chopped hot olives, garlic, walnuts, wild herbs, and olive oil. I could have eaten just that. I scribbled notes on a map I had folded in my back pocket, but, alas, I forgot about it and it went through the washing machine. Thank goodness for photos, even bad ones!

 

PS. I had an awful cold, so I held off the red wine, but I did drink the delicious local white, the fruity and crisp Sultaniye.

 

Day Two in Istanbul: A Culinary Walking Tour with Istanbul Eats 

 

As I noted above, Tom Sietsema and others have already described in detail the walking tour of the Old City with the folks from Istanbul Eats (hot links, above). I recommend the tour for non-professional foodies, but, as a food writer and inveterate, fearless traveler, I would be less than honest if I didn’t say that I was disappointed. I have written extensively in the past about the inherent pitfalls of anticipation (which can ruin everything from relationships to dining experiences), so I know that my expectations were mostly what caused my disappointments. That said, I will use my photos here to guide you through the parts of the tour where I actually learned something that I didn’t already know.

 

There were 6 of us on the tour ($125/person) that begins in front of the New Mosque and the Spice Market on the waterfront in Eminonu. There we met the ebullient Angelis Nannos (left), who is one of the guides who conduct these 6-hour-long tours six days each week. The website advertises: “Our Culinary Secrets of the Old City walk takes you beyond the major monuments and into the backstreets where all of the serious eating is done. We set off through the atmospheric, lesser-explored market streets around the Egyptian Spice Market and deeper into the untouristed Fatih neighborhood. In Kantarcilar, a district that has been selling weights and measures since Ottoman times, we visit a local confectionary where Turkish delight has been made and sold for 4 generations. From there we visit all but abandoned caravansaray, a couple of hidden historic sites, an old school pudding shop, an Ottoman era bozaci and finally a full lunch of traditional pit-roasted lamb in a very local, family-run place next to the Byzantine aqueducts (with lots of other edible treats along the way). These are the quintessential culinary backstreets.”

 

Our first stop was a street vendor of simits (above, with Angelis), a sesame-seed-coated, bagel-like roll, and brioche-like rolls whose name I don’t recall. I didn’t much care for either of them, so I didn’t write them down. It was very cold, windy, and humid, so we were all ready to get to the warehouse where we were served coffee and tea on a newspaper-covered make-do table amongst the coffee merchants. It seemed spontaneous, but I knew better: the same thing had happened on Tom’s, and others’ tours. Along the way, we had stopped to pick up olives and — of all things — string cheese. There were dried eggplants, dried sheeps’ intestines (which are rehydrated and used for sausage casings), cases and cases of offal and sausages of all sorts hanging about, but we were to taste none of those.  We saw a vast array of pickles, including an unripe plum said to be the best food for pregnant women, and mounds of mounds of spices, which, ironically, were conspicuous in their absence from nearly everything we ate. The plum is the second item in the middle row of the items in the photo at right, below. That’s the eggplant on the left, which we would have two days later,   and the dried intestines in the middle, below.

 

 

One of the most interesting things to me was the dried okra (pictured below, on the left), but I don’t recall either dried or fresh okra in anything we tasted our four days there — and I’m a huge okra fan. When I was working on my lowcountry cooking book (the 20th anniversary edition of which, by the way, will be published next fall), I conducted extensive interviews with Lucille Grant, the granddaughter of a slave and one of Charleston’s great cooks. She told me that her family used to string okra pods and shrimp heads and hang them under the tin roof to dry — the only place hot and dry enough in the humid lowcountry. They would then pound them later for gumbo. Next to the okra are some of the dried pepper and tomato pastes available, though these fundamental ingredients of Turkish cooking were never revealed to us in a dish.

 

 

There were some delicious finds along the way. Just before we entered the warehouse, we bought some fresh water buffalo clotted cream drizzled with honey from a street vendor (below). It was one of the best things we tasted, but I’ve had that here in Bulgaria, with better honey from the mountains, so even that was a bit of a letdown. This is the lemon-sized piece we had for the 7 of us.

 

There were huge displays of dried fruits everywhere — dozens of varieties of apricots, for example, but we were offered none of them, either.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And fish, too: hamsi, the Black Sea anchovies, and cinekop, immature bluefish, were in season, but if I hadn’t insisted, we would not have had a taste of either. Unfortunately, the fry shop we entered to sample the hamsi fried them in sunflower oil that wasn’t nearly hot enough. We were glad to be inside, but the fish were greasy. In an email exchange with Ansel Mullins, the co-author of Istanbul Eats: Exploring the Culinary Backstreets, he sent me a link to an environmental site that stated that the taking of young bluefish has led to a decline in their populations, so the eating of them is discouraged. I stopped eating tuna years ago because of the endangered status of bluefins, so I am glad to know that I didn’t contribute to the downfall of the bluefish, one of my favorites. Incidentally, Alan Davidson, the great British culinary historian and seafood expert, noted in Mediterranean Seafood that “There are five Turkish names for this fish, bestowed according to size, thus: — tiny: define yaprak (bay leaf); small: cinakop; larger: sari kanat (yellow wing); at its prime: lufer; very large: kofana.” At the time of Davidson’s writing (the early 70s), he noted that the fish caught in the fall migration are landed with “line and lamp.” I doubt that’s the case nowadays; hence, the overfishing. (Photo, below: anchovies, right; bluefish, left.) Fortunately, we had had expertly fried anchovies the night before at Giritli (see above).

 

On we walked through the winding streets that snake amongst the old warehouses, mosques, and baths, the streets lined with shops, street vendors, pushcarts, people, and cars. We visited one of the city’s major sellers of baklava, where Angelis donned the shopkeep’s hat as he had during Tom’s tour and where we ate several sweets drenched in sugar syrup, which is used in Turkey in lieu of the Greeks’ honey. The more pistachios and the fewer filo leaves, the more expensive the pastry. That I didn’t know. The single-layered, almost solid pistachio baklava on the right, below, was twice as expensive as the ordinary ones.