Istanbul

Best Bites of 2013: Istanbul

Editor’s note: This is the final installment of “Best Bites of 2013,” a roundup of our top culinary experiences over the last year. Be sure to check out the "best bites" in all the other cities CB covers. Breakfast in Erzincan We were strangers in a strange land – eastern Turkey’s Erzincan, to be exact – and Yalçın Kaya welcomed us into his cheese shop with such gracious fervor that it didn’t surprise us to find out that this Anatolian cheesemonger moonlights as an imam.

Istanbul

CB on the Road: In Eastern Turkey's Yogurtlands

Like many other Central Anatolian cities, Erzincan is one of those places with very little there there. The natural setting – on a high plateau and ringed by craggy peaks – is promising, but the town itself feels like it’s been scrubbed clean of all traces of history or local distinctiveness, its streets lined with characterless buildings painted in fading pastels, their ground floors occupied by the same furniture and supermarket chains found in every other city in the Turkish heartland. Erzincan does have one thing going for it, though: it’s the kind of place where you can land at the airport, hop into a waiting taxi and ask your driver to take you to the local cheese sellers’ bazaar, and he’ll take you straight there, no questions asked, as if it’s the most natural request he could get.

Istanbul

Salep: Pure and Uncut

When we last visited Cemal Bey, he was sitting behind a desk in a small, bare office on the second floor of a decrepit building near the Egyptian Bazaar in the city’s old quarter (he has since moved). Three large burlap sacks filled with what look like jumbo-sized yellow raisins are all that adorn the room. That and a fax machine. The window behind him frames one of Istanbul’s many transfixing cityscapes – the Golden Horn stretching out under the Galata Bridge where it meets the Bosphorus and the Marmara Sea, departing ferries churning the water white – but Cemal keeps his eye on a fax that’s coming in.

Istanbul

Hamsi: Every Which Way

As a chill sets in and heavy clouds roll over Istanbul, turning the Bosphorus battleship gray, we say goodbye to the luscious strawberries and blood-red tomatoes in the market. Fall marks the start of hamsi season, a time when small anchovies fill the nets of fishing boats on the Black Sea coast, squirming their way – with all of the country’s anticipation – onto grills and into pans and ovens throughout Turkey. The colder and rainier it gets, the fatter and cheaper the hamsi become.

Istanbul

İnebolu Pazarı: Shroomin' à la Turca

“You can eat these raw, efendim!” shouted Aziz Bey to a suspicious woman dressed in a headscarf of sharp geometric designs and a denim duster. “Don’t be scared!” he said, ripping the cap off of a raw kokulu cincire mushroom with his teeth and chewing it in an exaggerated, open-mouthed way to show that there were no tricks. “Mis gibi!” he said, using a phrase that is more frequently printed on laundry detergent bottles or uttered by mothers doting over infants. “Fragrant!” In Turkey, many people assign much of what happens throughout the day to kismet, or fate, but when eating wild mushrooms you might be tempting it. Every year, it seems, local papers report on someone’s demise by mushrooms, which explained why the woman in the duster was reluctant to finish the transaction.

Istanbul

Yedikule: An Istanbul Neighborhood’s Bitter Harvest

Foreigners living in Istanbul often say they love the place for its history, while some say it’s the people who make it special. We find life here mystifying for the unpredictable dialogue between the two, the way 15 million or so people reconcile their daily lives with this city’s rich past. To live inside this beautiful crash course is invigorating and, at the same time, a heartbreaking experience. Where else does the elegant silhouette of migratory storks cross a skyline of construction cranes busy laying a metro tube to connect two continents, a project whose progress was stalled by the unexpected discovery of one of the richest underwater archaeological finds ever, a lost port full of ancient boats filled with age-old cargo? Walking these streets, every day we see something so fabulous that it takes our breath away, just as we spot something around the corner threatening to smash it.

Istanbul

Kalpazankaya Restaurant: Paradise Found

One of the great joys of spring and summertime in Istanbul is the chance to get away for a day to one of the Princes’ Islands, the car-free and forested archipelago that is a short ferry ride away from the city. The only downside to an island hop is actually getting there. As soon as spring makes its first appearance in Istanbul, the hordes descend on the mainland’s ferry terminal, filling the boats to beyond capacity (at least on the weekends). With your neighbor’s picnic basket sticking into your ribs, the boat ride to the islands is usually less of a pleasure cruise and something more resembling those scenes in natural disaster or science fiction films where a frantic population is forced to huddle together after barely escaping their city’s demise.