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Although there are complex subcategories, most Turkish restaurants fall under two headings—lokantas and meyhanes. The former are essentially lunch places serving good, plain food to workers. Alcohol is rarely available, and menus are for the uninitiated. You simply walk up to the steam tables where the food is displayed, and pick whatever you like the look of. There will be succulent soups (recommended for colds, flu, or hangovers), stewed meats and vegetables (okra, spinach, chard, eggplant), and fresh green beans and white beans in tomato sauce. And your choice will be on your table almost before you’ve had time to sit down.

While it is true that you can find any kind of cuisine you might desire in Istanbul, from Korean to Iberian, served in settings that range from the rudimentary to the drop-dead elegant, if you want to understand the soul of the city a long evening in a meyhane is obligatory. In discussing meyhanes we aren’t just talking about food, but about the exuberant expression of an entire way of life. Meyhanes, which serve alcohol, tend to come in clusters, and in Kumkapı and Beyoğlu there are whole streets of them, all vying with polite desperation for your custom. Weaving your way between gesticulating waiters and itinerant musicians, your party (which should ideally consist of at least six people) will soon find a table, and you should immediately order rakıs all round. Rakı is the legendary, Turkish anise potation that destroyed the liver of the great Kemal Atatürk. Since it also indirectly caused the death of Orhan Veli—the greatest poet of meyhane culture, who once wrote “I should have been/A fish at the bottom/Of a bottle of booze”—it should be treated with deep respect. As soon as your drinks have arrived, a waiter will swoop toward you balancing an enormous, round tray heavy with meze. This is why you will need at least six people, to appreciate the full panoply of flavors, from lakerda (pickled fish with red onions) through roasted, sweet red peppers to semizotu (purslane in a yogurt and garlic dressing).

As the evening progresses your main course—often seafood, such as shrimp baked in a casserole or whiting, battered and fried and served with arugula—may come to seem less and less important, and you should postpone ordering it until the last minute, since its arrival signals the beginning of the end of keyif. Toward the end of the evening in a meyhane, any number of things may happen, but, despite the amount of rakı consumed, drunken boorishness is very rare. Musicians are usually within earshot, so perhaps a group of women (out on the town without their men-folk) will rise to their feet, urged on by the shrill squealing of a zurna (a kind of elongated clarinet) and the clatter of a hand-drum and indulge in some impromptu belly dancing. And yes, it is quite likely that they will dance on the chairs and the tables, but they will do so with a surprising decorousness. It is even more likely that an entire table will burst suddenly into song, and will soon be joined by neighboring tables exchanging deftly harmonized verses. The song will be infinitely melancholy, but one should not conclude from this that Istanbul is a city of depressives. Their native wisdom urges the Turks to embrace sadness as an inevitable concomitant of living. At such moments, everyone in a meyhane is at one with the spirit of Orhan Veli as he sat by the Bosporus overcome, for no particular reason, with an “indescribable sadness,” and sang his song to the city he called “my lover, my fever.”

THE STYLE

When we think of Turkish style we think of Iznik ceramics, kilims, carpets and hamams, but we are living in the past, which is not where most Turks want to be. Good quality kilims are still being produced, but it is mostly foreigners who buy them, and rugs can’t tell us much about the style of contemporary Istanbul.

A style only becomes identifiable when it becomes self-aware, and something to aspire to. All it takes is a few cafés and bars where