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by Barbara Penny Angelakis
Perched on the shores of the Bosporus, the strait dividing Europe from Asia at Façyo, one of the popular seafood restaurants lining the shore, we’re finishing a feast of appetizers, grilled seafood and fish. This is not really elegant dining, it’s peasant and fisherman food. But the tastes are so wonderful, the ingredients so fresh from the nearby farms and the sea beneath our feet, that who cares?
 Plump mussels, some stuffed with rice, onion, pine-nuts, black currants and dill and cooked in olive-oil; others dipped in an anise-flavored batter, deep fried and served with a garlicky dip; fire-licked grilled octopus; Patliçan Salata (smoked, skinned. puréed eggplant mixed with a homemade tangy mayonnaise for an incredibly creamy dip); Tursi, mixed vegetable pickles; Çacik, thick yogurt with shredded cucumber, lots of garlic, olive-oil and mint; Lakerda, salt-preserved tuna in olive-oil; Imam Bayildi, (the name means the holly man fainted) a luscious cold dish of eggplant stuffed with onion, garlic, tomato, sweet red pepper and parsley cooked in olive oil; Arnavut Çigeri, calf’s liver cubed,  dusted with a mixture of flour and paprika, quick deep fried and served piping hot with sliced tomato, lemon wedges and a shredded onion and cilantro mixture; Sigara Boregi, phyllo rolls stuffed with feta cheese, egg and parsley, then deep fried; fried smelts, eaten whole; charcoal grilled red mullets and swordfish kebabs; the waiter brings dishes and we keep cleaning them out washing the food down with generous glassfuls of Kulüp Rakisi (Club Raki) on the rocks, an anise and raisin distillate that, if you are not used to it, will curl your toes.
Here is the former capital of three successive empires, Istanbul. It sits at a crossroads of civilization, where Europe, Asia and the Middle East met and fought and traded. This is a city at once ancient and modern, spectacularly beautiful yet utterly frustrating.
Istanbul’s cuisine is a mixture of the successive civilizations that occupied this area. The seafarers of ancient Greece left a tradition of salt-preserved, smoked meats and fish. The Romans, the habit of stuffing vegetables with a mixture of ground lamb and rice and covering them with an egg-lemon sauce. The Seltzuk nomads, one of the early Turkoman tribes that came from the Asian steppes, the use of yogurt in cooking. The Ottomans, the last Turkish group to conquer the city, adopted from Byzantium cooking of vegetables in olive oil. The variety is endless and meze, an Arabic tradition along the Mediterranean shores which can be also found in Spain and Portugal under the guise of a tapa, allows small-portion tasting of these wonderful creations as accompaniments to wine, raki or other alcoholic potables.
 And, please, let’s not forget the deserts. Baklava, kadayif and burma can be found throughout the Mediterranean, mostly soaked in different tasting sirups (orange flavoring is most common in Istanbul), but there are specialties like kazandibi, a milk pudding that is cooked in a large pot (kazan) and is allowed to become a little burned at the bottom, then sprinkled with cinnamon; and tavuk gögsü, a delectable custard whose chief ingredient is the white meat of a chicken! And, of course Haji Bekir Locum, these small mouthfuls of pure pleasure... the original Turkish Delight.
Turkish food in hotel restaurants like Tugra, at Çiragan Palace, with an exquisite view of the Bosporus, is very good but a little too westernized for my taste. Actually, Daveli that specializes in spicy Anatolian dishes and overlooks the Sea of Marmara and Lal that serves pure Ottoman cuisine in a delightful summer terrace, are more the type of places that I frequent for lunch or dinner.
Other cuisines, as well, are starting to tempt Istanbul’s in crowds. Chef Rudolf Van Nunen, a star chef of the local dinning scene, serves up Moroccan inspired dishes at Shashibala. The cinnamon flavored beef tagine served over couscous and duck with raisins, figs and apricots, are dishes favored by summer dinners.
The restaurant scene is fast changing in Istanbul. Even though the vast majority of residents still entertain mostly at home and Turkish-style cooking is still the most prevalent form of cuisine, restaurant chefs are starting to make inroads into the collective consciousness and the impact of non-Turkish, non-Mediterranian cuisine is felt more and more at the upper-class level.
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