Istanbul's Surprise

I just got back from Istanbul, where I spent six days trying to sample all the food I’d heard about and had to try, plus all the food I’d never heard of before, plus all the food I knew and loved and had to try at its point of origin. Of course, in only six days, I came nowhere close to succeeding. I’m going to have to go back.

I don’t have any photos at this point, because I’ve been taking pictures on actual film (yes, you can still buy it at a few select locations) that will have to be developed when I get back to America. I’m going to hold off on posting about the more visually impressive food-related experiences until then: the market near the Fatih mosque that seemed to go on forever, the glitz of the Spice Bazaar, the strange albino blackberries that turned out to be mulberries, the fresh fruit that served as bar snacks with at a rooftop bar with a view spanning two continents – all of these would benefit from photographic proof. So for now I’ll talk about one of the things that surprised me most about Istanbul: the bread.

My first night in the city, we went out for meze, or “Turkish tapas,” as it was explained to me. Being intimately familiar with every menu of Lebanese maza in the 11201 zip code, I expected to be able to predict everything that would arrive at our table. We chose a few items (aubergine puree, sardines, hummus, cucumber yogurt) and I asked Katherine if she thought that would be enough – they were going to bring us unlimited pita anyway, right? Wrong. At least, not quite, she said. In Istanbul, they eat meze with slices of white bread. There is pide, but it’s mostly used as a base for boat-shaped pizza-like things topped with roasted vegetables or ground meat, or for döner wraps. I didn’t fully believe it until the bread basket got to the table, but it’s true: Istanbul, to my surprise, is teeming with leavened bread.

This meal opened my eyes to the fact that Turkish food, at least in Istanbul, has significant Balkan and Eastern European influences in addition to its Middle Eastern ones. A few days later, I had lunch at a lokanta specializing in Black Sea cuisine, which served flavorful fava beans stewed in the pod, and also provided each table with a gargantuan plastic bag of fluffy, foccacia-ish bread. I quickly discovered that bakeries and street carts sell sesame rolls in a variety of shapes (including the ubiquitous simit, a large circular twist), along with fairly decent brioche, and we even found some delicious challah at a particularly nice place in Kurtulus.

Not long ago I was buying a bag of pitas every two or three days. I expected a trip to Turkey to increase that average, but I haven’t had a single one since I left America. But with a simit vendor on every street corner, I didn’t have a chance to miss them.