Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [140]
Most items on the menu have long names—in-house hickory smoked red mullet and pomegranate salsa in chilled red turnip soup; slow-cooked beef cheeks and erişte (Turkish noodles) with goat milk yogurt sauce and gremolata; green tea champagne jelly with passion fruit cream, hazelnut croquant, and pineapple curd—but are wildly delicious. The cocktail list is nothing if not mod, with the signature, The Istanbul, a cool concoction of rakı, vodka, and Bodrum tangerine. I’ve read that the bar at the Taksim outpost serves drinks in shot glasses made entirely of ice. Somehow I missed that, but you can bet I’ll be there on the first night of my next visit.
Çiya (Güneşlibahçe Sokak 43-44, Kadıköy / +90 216 418 5115 / ciya.com.tr). As the Hedonist’s Guide to Istanbul puts it, Çiya is “a restaurant worth crossing the continents for. This won’t immediately be apparent as Çiya, only a few streets away from the ferry port in Kadıköy, is unassuming in appearance and most of the clientele look as if they’ve only crossed the road to get there. Which they have.” Though tourists are onto the delicious and immensely satisfying food served up by chef Musa Dağdeviren, Çiya is beloved by locals. Çiya is actually a compound of three places, two kebab spots and one sofrasi (home-style restaurant). Musa himself is from southeastern Turkey, and is half Kurdish, half Turkish. His view of food is all-inclusive, with dishes ranging from “the Balkans to the Caucasus and from Asia to the Arabian Peninsula.” Paula Wolfert, writing in Food & Wine in 2004, called him “part chef, part culinary anthropologist,” and Saveur included him in its annual list, the Saveur 100, in 2006.
Musa travels all around Anatolia to track down regional recipes, often at customers’ requests, and he just keeps adding them to the menu, which is enormous (he offers fifty to sixty-five or more different types of kebabs alone), and you can be assured that your meal will be different each time you come. (Note that alcohol isn’t served at any of the three establishments.) According to Saveur, one of Çiya’s early customers was journalist Zeynep Çalişkan, who was so smitten with the kebabs from her hometown, Antakya, that she soon became a regular and ended up marrying Musa. (Zeynep now manages the business.) She says, “He relates everything to food. You could say, ‘It’s nice weather,’ and he’ll say, ‘Yes, good for the sunflowers, for sunflower oil.’ ” Making the journey to the culinary shrine that is Çiya will be one of your lasting memories of Istanbul.
Feriye Lokanta (Çırağan Caddesi 40, Ortaköy / +90 212 227 2216 / feriye.com). Feriye is not in a former palace—though it’s a grand building right on the Bosphorus shore that used to belong to the Çırağan Palace—but rather in a late-nineteenth-century former police station. Chef and manager Vedat Başaran is the son of Bosnian Muslims who immigrated to Istanbul in 1956 and opened a deli-like store. It wasn’t until he was studying in London, in the 1980s, when he saw a BBC documentary about how food was prepared in a traditional Aegean Sea village that he began to take an interest in Turkey’s culinary history. When Başaran returned to Turkey, with a master’s degree in professional cooking, he applied for a research grant from the cultural ministry but was rejected, so he decided he would have to pursue learning about Ottoman cuisine by a different route. He then was put in charge of Tuğra, the restaurant in the soon-to-open Çırağan Palace Hotel, and he persuaded the hotel’s management to allow him to create a menu of pure Ottoman dishes, a departure from the Continental cuisine considered standard hotel restaurant fare at that time.
Başaran began buying every Ottoman cookbook he could find in the bazaar, but after a while word went around that “someone” was buying