Turkey’s melting pot: a foodie break in Istanbul

29.04.2024 - 11:23 / theguardian.com / Lake Como

Saturday morning, 10am, and I’m sitting at a café table on a cobbled street in the Beşiktaş neighbourhood of Istanbul, sipping a glass of çay (Turkish tea) and waiting for breakfast. By the café entrance, a plump, grey-haired man in a crisp white apron is sharpening a knife, before slicing through what is generally acknowledged to be the largest doner kebab in Turkey. The kebab weighs 100kg, a meaty monster slowly cooking from the outside in. Our guide, Sinan, tells us that Black Sea (Karadeniz) doners from this area are always the best – all of it will be gone by mid-afternoon.

Istanbul is a city that runs on its stomach. It may be steeped in history, but the best way to understand this multi-layered melting pot of east and west, Ottoman and Byzantine, is undoubtedly through its food. I’m lucky enough to be spending a couple of days with Cenk Debensason, recently awarded a Michelin star for his restaurant, Arkestra. The chance to discover the city through his eyes – and taste buds – promises a different version of Istanbul.

After breakfast, instead of following the well-trodden tourist trail to the historic district of Sultanahmet, we head north to Bebek, a leafy suburb where the streets are dotted with boutiques and small-batch coffee shops. I feel rather like I’m in the Turkish equivalent of Hampstead. Like London, Istanbul shares a similar sense of being a collection of villages, stitched together over the centuries, and getting away from the centre offers the chance to experience it more like a local than a visitor. We dip into Midnight, where the artfully arranged shelves and racks are filled with jewellery, ceramics and clothes by the city’s hottest designers, and head on to the Petra Roasting Company, where sofas are shared with snoozing cats and the nuttily rich Ethiopian coffee fires us up.

From Bebek, we go further north to Tarabya, a waterfront neighbourhood that has attracted tourists since it began life as a health resort in the 18th century. As we drive alongside the Bosphorus, it reminds me of the winding roads that flank Lake Como: restaurants and hotels on one side, the water on the other – and on the opposite side, opulent mansions built decades, even centuries before, for the city’s wealthy elite.

We’ve come for lunch at Kiyi, an Istanbul institution that has been serving the same fish-rich menu since it opened in the 1960s. The meal is exquisite: plump mussels stuffed with mint, crisp calamari, rose-tinted octopus and taramasalata thick with roe. The vast turbot that appears as our shared main course, buttery soft, slipping off the bone like silk, ruins me for all other fish for ever.

After lunch, we drive back to Beyoglu to explore the cobbled streets of the Çukurcuma district,