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Çiya Dinner, $40. Güneşlibahçe Sokak 48B / +90 216 336 3013 / ciya.com.tr

Hünkar Dinner, $100. Mim Kemal Öke Caddesi 21, Nişantaşi / +90 212 225 4665

Kale Çay Bahçesi Breakfast, $25. Yahya Kemal Caddesi 36, Rumeli Hisarı / +90 212 257 5578

Karaköy Güllüoğlu Börek, from $5 per pound. Rhıtım Caddesi 29, Karaköy / +90 212 293 0910 / gulluoglu.biz

Köşebaşi at Reina Dinner, $110. Muallim Naci Caddesi 44, Ortaköy / +90 212 258 0683 / kosebasi.com.tr

Mado Ice cream, $6 per pound. İstiklâl Caddesi 186/2, Beyoğlu / +90 212 244 1781 / mado.com.tr

Mikla Dinner, $125. The Marmara Pera, Meşrutiyet Caddesi 167-185, Tepebaşı / +90 212 293 5656 / istanbulyi.com

Tarihi Sultanahmet Köftecisi Lunch, $35. Divanyolu Caddesi 12, Sultanahmet / +90 212 520 0566

BEYOĞLU: TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY ISTANBUL

Much has been said about the rampant gentrification of Beyoğlu, formerly Pera, the European quarter first settled by Genovese traders. Back in the nineteenth century, İstiklâl Caddesi, the district’s thronged pedestrian thoroughfare, was a glamorous cosmopolitan boulevard known as the Grande Rue de Pera. Once flanked with cafés, embassies, and Parisian-style arcades, the street has recently been repaved with ungainly slabs of granite, while its weathered pâtisseries and old döner dives are yielding to latte pushers and international chains. A few hours on İstiklâl can be an exercise in hüzün, the melancholy yearning for a crumbling past that pervades Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City. Still, the district is home to some of the city’s most stylish and sophisticated restaurants.

Typifying Beyoğlu’s thrust into the globalized future is 360 Istanbul, a restaurant-cum-club that resembles a postindustrial glass house set atop a nineteenth-century building overlooking the Bosporus. At the stoves is the indecently handsome South African chef-owner Mike Norman, whose menu—tandoori chicken pizza, beef carpaccio, zucchini blossom dolmas—is as giddily international as the crowd.

Some of the fickle Turkish beau monders who couldn’t get enough of 360 when it opened three years ago have since migrated to Mikla, owned by Mehmet Gürs, the lanky charismatic grand vizier of Istanbul’s restaurant scene. Following the success of his previous ventures, Lokanta and NuTeras, which jump-started the revitalization of the downtrodden Tepebaşı Boulevard near İstiklâl, Gürs opened Mikla on the seventeenth floor of the Marmara Pera hotel in 2005. The thirty-eight-year-old Gürs, who has a Finnish mother and a Turkish architect father, grew up shuffling between Stockholm and Istanbul. (“We celebrated bayram with a Turkish feast and Christmas with pig’s feet and moose roast,” he recalls.) In 1994, after graduating from Johnson & Wales, he settled in Turkey, bringing with him a flair for Scandinavian design and a sharp minimalist cooking style that defines his nine restaurants.

Mikla is his masterpiece, commanding Istanbul’s most breathtaking panorama from its glassy perch. Striped marble, dark wood, and Alvar Aalto chairs set the scene for food that fuses Turkish ingredients with Gürs’s Nordic penchant for raw fish and smoky-salty flavors. There’s a luminously fresh sea bass carpaccio sprinkled with salmon eggs, lemon, and dill. Hamsi, anchovies from the Black Sea, are ingeniously laminated onto gossamer slices of toast and highlighted with a lemony foam. Gürs’s shank of grass-fed Turkish lamb is slowly cooked to a melting tenderness and accented with lingonberries. Still, it’s hard to concentrate on the plates when the domes and minarets of the Old City are glowing below and you can play Name That Landmark. Far left? The stubby tower of Topkapı Palace. To its right? The eternal Hagia Sophia. Looming over it all is the swelling vision of the Süleymaniye Mosque, Istanbul’s masterpiece by Mimar Sinan, the Michelangelo of Ottoman architects.

ASIAN SPICE: CROSSING TO KADIKÖY

Too few Americans bother to make the trip across the Bosporus to Istanbul’s Asian side.