istanbul eats part one

I was talking to a friend recently about the time she visited me in Istanbul for a week with her boyfriend. She's one of the most bad ass people I know, and her immediate plans include both getting married to said boyfriend/now fiancé and then bicycling across southeast Asia with him. We reminisced about that time nearly two years ago: my foul mood, the weather, how lovely my roommates were... And then she told me something - confessed it, even. She said, "Anya, I dream about Turkish breakfast on a daily basis. I think about it all the time. I'm not joking. All the time. It is my goal in life to return and eat Turkish breakfast again."

I laughed. Because I can relate.

People ask me frequently what I love about Turkey and why I want to go back. After I get through the usual bits about how wonderful and friendly and kind the people are there, how interesting the history, how diverse the culture, and if I'm being honest, how sexy the men can be, I am forced to finally admit that it's really the food that speaks to me on a soul-mate level. The lentil soup. The mild but endless cheese selection. The briny olives. The tenderly roasted eggplant. Don't even get me started on börek. Or baklava. Or how I secretly love the bittersweet tea. My heart aches for this shit. Yes, of course I miss my friends and I crave the salty Bosphorus air whipping through my hair. But I miss the food every moment of every day.

So when my mom and I were discussing what we wanted to do with our eight glorious days in Istanbul this last November, she got the words "walking,""food," and "tour" out of her mouth before I shouted a hearty "YES PLEASE."

Though we originally inquired about their tour of Beyoğlu, the "new" part of the European half of the city where Taksim lives, Istanbul Eats told us they only had a tour of the old city available. What ensued was by far the best tour of any kind I've ever taken or will ever take, and potentially one of the top five best days of my life. I know this. I embrace it.

We met up with our guide, Uğur (pronounced "ooo-uhr"), and four other lucky devils at 9:30 that Monday morning right outside of the Spice Bazaar.

 
As a rule, I'm pretty wary (or maybe weary) of Turks in the tourism industry, so I kept a frosty distance. Until he won me over. Within five minutes. Uğur lured me in with his National Geographic baseball cap (he leads tours for them as well) but he really sealed the deal by being funny, smart, and incredibly knowledgeable. The man knew his food but he also really knew his history and wasn't stingy with the details or the answers to the approximately 1,362 questions I flung at him.

Our breakfast started at the Spice Bazaar with Uğur picking up all the essentials from his favorite vendors. He nabbed some black and green olives, a few kinds of cheese, kaymak (which is clotted cream), Turkish Nutella, some Persian cucumbers, and from his bag, took out the crowning jewel: beautifully bronzed simit he'd gone all the way across the water for.

 
We somehow landed at a beaten up wooden table with plastic stools in the middle of a mildly derelict corridor technically inside a bazaar. You know. Like you do. Uğur grabbed a newspaper and covered our table with it while shouting at someone passing by for the first round of our tea. He took out a little bag of homemade lentil meatballs he claimed he'd prepared himself, too. Words will never express how fucking delicious that semi-shady breakfast was. The simit was somehow still warm and beyond fresh. I've never tasted the molasses each are theoretically coated in before. Oh man. The stuff dreams are made of. 

We soon discovered that the three mystery Europeans at our table were in fact Scots with mind-bendingly thick accents and the other guy was an adventurous doctor without borders from New York. All of us had been to Istanbul before and all of us had fallen in love with the food. We found out later that this was the second time the Scots had taken this exact same tour - they just couldn't get enough.

The great thing about a walking food tour is that you get to walk - and eat - so it feels like the massive caloric intake is no biggie. You're constantly sauntering off that butter, right? Right... After breakfast, Uğur took us by a kebab shop preparing its classic and slightly famous döner for the day. Though the thought of eating it didn't appeal to me, it was pretty rad to watch those massive hunks of meat be assembled. The guy must've used, I don't know, fifty chicken breasts, ten sliced tomatoes, and a solid dozen peppers on his skewer, each stacked lovingly by hand. It wasn't even approaching cooked, so we went on our merry way and landed at a hole in the wall selling spicy stuffed things. (Technical term, of course.) Learning that we were vegetarians didn't dissuade Uğur for a single second - he just foisted weirder shit on us, like hot hot HOT re-hydrated stuffed eggplant and bell peppers with rice.

(You can see their dehydrated husks in the picture above.) The others ate köfte (meatballs) battered and fried in something, which I can only assume was delicious for them. From there, we walked about ten paces and were ushered into another hole in the wall, but a hole technically part of the Rüstem Paşa mosque complex. It's not every day you eat under a mosque. Kinda cool.

I think it's safe to say this soup shack has never seen so many people (7) cross its humble threshold at one time, but god damn was it delicious. Lentil soup, or "mercimek çorbası" in Turkish, is like a warm hug on a cold morning by the one you cherish most. Except it's like being hugged all the time because it's everywhere. Uğur didn't disappoint. If I ever have the patience to get lost and find this place again, I'll be there every day.

He might be a mind reader, because post-soup, Uğur took us up to Rüstem Paşa Camii itself. For those of you who have uncannily good memories, RPC is my absolute favorite mosque and I'm a big enough architecture geek to say that with a straight face. It's small, it's well-lit, and though I'd never visited before with anything other than my eyeballs and a tiny article my mom found in the New York Times, I knew it was full of secrets.

 Uğur seemed excited by how excited I was and he was kind enough to point out some various but subtle bits I might care about. He explained to me that most architects and engineers in Ottoman Turkey were in fact Armenian, and Mimar Sinan, king of them all (and mastermind behind this mosque), was as well. Christians and Muslims not only got along once but they built that massive empire together. Pretty sweet.

Not skipping a beat, we left this spiritual respite for something a little more relevant to the tour: the baklava mother-lode. I'm no stranger to the sweet stuff, but I admit that I wasn't prepared for what was coming our way. Ushered into a smallish but crazy modern shop, we were instructed to sit on little poufs (ottomans, if you will) and nurse yet another cup of tea (#4 or 5?) while our treats were prepared for us. Uğur took this time to tell us about his hometown of Gaziantep, the home of baklava (he claims), and certainly the region in Turkey most famous for pistachios. And then out came a bounty: pistachio baklava, walnut baklava, baklava with a name I don't remember but whose taste will forever haunt me. They baked clotted cream DIRECTLY into it and somehow, that cream turned into a gooey warm almost cheesy something. Oh, and it was goat milk cream.

Yeah. I said goat milk. Deal with it.

(to be continued.)