ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE AUSTRALIAN
Venture to the Asian side of the Bosphorus for food that makes the locals cry with joy.
Mussels sizzle on the stainless steel griddles at the ubiquitous Mercan fast food stalls. The minced meat that the red-gingham-aproned cooks fry up and slap into baguettes looks and smells good too. ‘It’s tripe,’ says our Turkish guide, Selin Rozanes, ‘mixed with oregano. We call it kokoreç.’
The main trouble with tripe, the food writer M.F.K. Fisher lamented, is ‘I can count on one hand the people who will eat it with me.’ She would not have had that problem here at Istanbul’s Kadiköy Market. Mercan are doing brisk pre-lunch business this unseasonably warm November morning. And most customers seem to opt for a side of tripe roll with their garlic-sauced mussels. ‘They go together,’ Selin tells us.
Rozanes is a former travel agent who describes herself as ‘gastronomically inquisitive’, runs culinary tours throughout Turkey and offers cooking classes in her Istanbul apartment. We join her earlier that morning at the Misir Çarşisi (the Egyptian Market or Spice Bazaar) for a market tour to be followed by lunch. Our first stop was Shop 51, the baharat (spice) stall Ucuzcular, which the owner, Bilge, tells us means ‘the guys who sell for a reasonable price’. We don’t comparison shop, but they are certainly the guys who sell the tempting spice blends.
We buy so many we qualify for a free string bag, and they Cryovac our purchases, which they assure us will pass Australian customs. (Postscript: they do, and the Janisarry mix—red pepper, sumac and oregano—goes well with omelettes, as the guys predicted.)
Although the Egyptian Market is still a mecca for spices, these days it is dominated by trinket stalls catering for tourists, who comprise 95 per cent or more of the shoppers. The few locals seem to all be lined up to buy coffee at Kurukahveci Mehmet Efendi. Instead of joining the long queue, we set our sights across the Bosphorus strait to the Asian side of Istanbul. We board the ferry at the Eminönü terminal, opposite the Spice Bazaar, and 15 minutes later we are in Kadiköy, at a real working market.
The ratio of tourists to locals is reversed, and we are contemplating the tripe. I decide to save myself for lunch, and opt for the mussels alone.
We join Turkish women shopping for their dinner supplies. We admire the Palamut (Atalantic bonito) its red gills fanned, proclaiming its freshness, and the Levrek (European sea bass) that we had enjoyed at Balikçi Sabahattin, a meyhane (fish and mezze restaurant) the previous evening. We visit the pickle shop with its massive bottles of cauliflower, turnip, beetroot, red pepper and garlic. It seems everything that grows has been pickled.
We sample tulum (sheep’s cheese in goat’s skin). We try tahini rolls at the pastry shop Beyaz Firin and agree with Selin that tahini does taste good in bread as well as in dips. The sweet shop şekerci Cafer Erol proves the most tempting, though, with its huge jars of hard candies. Samples of rose petal jam and aşure—a traditional Turkish fruit, nut and cereal pudding—are pressed on us, and our string bag is brought into service to hold an elegantly boxed assortment of cinnamon-flavoured and chocolate-coated Turkish delight, pin-wheel shaped pistachio marzipan, and citrus-flavoured jellies sprinkled with sugar.
We have only walked a few blocks and it is time for lunch at Çiya Kebap. It’s a simply decorated place with wooden tables, tiled floor and pots of food steaming cafeteria-style at the front. There are two other Çiyas within a 20 metre radius: Çiya Kebap II and Ciya Sofrasi. All three restaurants are owned by the chef Musa Dağdeviren, a former baker and army cook, now acclaimed both in Turkey and internationally for his traditional Anatolian dishes and use of unusual ingredients such as pickled rockweed, pulverised roots of trees and mallow (another weed.
Profiles in the New Yorker and Food & Wine magazine, and celebrity chef appearances in the United States and at the Sydney International Food Festival haven’t spoiled the twinkle-eyed Dagdeviren, who sports a Groucho Marx moustache. He chats with us over three shot glasses containing, respectively, pomegranate juice, sumac (the grains first boiled then sweetened) and black mulberry sherbet. Dagdeviren says he loved Australia and cites Gigi Baba in Melbourne as a favourite restaurant.
Heading back to the kitchen, he tells us, ‘Your visit is an honour.’ He interrupts our thank yous. ‘No, an honour for you,’ he grins.
And then our 25-course tasting menu (about $30) begins. Of course there is mezze, and Dagdeviren’s muhammara, with its secret ingredient of sweet peanuts, is outstanding. Three soups follow. I like the chick pea with bulgur balls and yoghurt. We move on to mains. There is lamb casseroled with quince, chestnut and apricot, served on a spoon; lamb tagine with eggplant and tomato; sheep’s intestine stuffed with bulgur; and dried eggplants stuffed with meat. Also a few of the restaurant’s 50 varieties of kebap—the pistachio with knife-ground beef is my favourite –and lahmacun, a thin pizza-type crust spread with minced lamb, parsley, pepper flakes and sumac.
What words best describe Dagdeviren’s food? Sublime? Some of it, certainly—the lamb and eggplant melts in my mouth. His mission is to present long-forgotten dishes, and appreciative Turkish customers have been known to cry with delight when they recognise dishes their grandmother made. I don’t tear up, but I do think of the late David Foster Wallace, who took a luxury cruise and drank ‘the sort of coffee you marry somebody for being able to make.’
Dagdeviren is back to farewell us. He introduces his wife, a former customer and now the restaurants’ manager. Dressed in a checked shirt, knitted vest and velvet jacket, he’s heading to the farm just out of Istanbul where his family grow many of the restaurant’s supplies. Dagdeviren is a busy chap; he also edits a food magazine) and is planning a culinary institute in Istanbul to train young chefs.
He warns us that dessert will be special. It is kunefe , a pancake-like pudding made with the shredded pastry, kadayif, cheese and syrup. It is served with clotted cream, and side dishes of olives, pumpkin, eggplant and tomato. All the vegetables are candied, and, yes, they do go together.