Yekta Pinar
discovers excellence in unassuming surroundings
in Istanbul’s cheap and cheerful lokantas
T T - S
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JH 13
LOKANTA LUNCHE
A
lth o u g hi ti ss a ido fp o l ic e m e n,THE SAME HOLDS TRUE OF BURGER Kings: a nation gets the fast food it deserves. There is no doubt that Turkey still cares about the meals it snatches at midday. Western-style fast food may be planning an assault on the high-rent frontages of Istanbul's main shopping arteries, but “real lunch” is well entrenched just around the com er — and, if anything, is just as fast if not faster.
The truth is that service in most Turkish restaurants is anything but slow. This is particularly true of the basic lokanta. These are the establishments which serve hazır yemek — ready-prepared food, also
known as ev yemeği, or the food people might cook in their own
homes. In the best of these places, a great deal of energy goes into the preparation and serving of food, which is dished out with speed and bravado.
Lokantas are simple and cheap — the cost of a couple of dishes and a sweet are unlikely to top T L 10,000 ($4) except in moments of wild abandon. In the more up-market places, the bill might creep up to about $10. Alcohol is almost never served — the preferred drink is water, always on the table next to huge piles of bread. The easiest way to order is to go to the kitchen and choose. In many places even this is unnecessary as the food simmers in plain view.
Konyali is one of the best and oldest exponents of the
elements of Turkish cuisine and is, unashamedly, a cafeteria. Its original restaurant opposite Sirkeci Station is now a retail outlet for its fine savoury pastries and sweets.
Just around the com er is the cafeteria which serves a greater variety of food than the average lokanta. This means you need a steel-like will if you are to resist those dishes which are alien to the spirit of ev yemeği. It is best to walk determinedly past the et böreği (puff pastry filled with braised meat) and to shun the vastly superior döner which spins on a spit in front of a wall of bona fide charcoal. Instead, linger at the impressive array of dishes which include meat wrapped in
aubergine and an excellent i(pilav (a rice seasoned with pine kernels, small currants, a trace of chicken livers and, in this case, pistachio and dill).
Konyali has branches elsewhere, including the franchise in Topkapi Palace. One of the two restaurants it operates there is more stylish with views of the sea, but this does little to enhance the food. Grabbing dishes and sating greed in the cafeteria down the hill at Sirkeci somehow gives the dishes a better flavour.
Part of the pleasure of eating in lokantas is the discovery of excellence in unassuming surroundings — although waiters wearing ties is always a hopeful sign. But even more important than clean table-cloths, or indeed table-cloths at all, is the presence of a characteristic bustle. The two
Pandelli restaurants have always been at the hub of things.
One is a rather grand businessman’s lunch venue above the entrance to the Egyptian Spice Bazaar, but the Pandelli Kinross referred to in Europa Minor, where ambassadors sat elbow to elbow with fishermen in the Fifties, was closer to the Golden Horn until bulldozers moved in. It remained faithful to its spice, soap and olive oil trading neighbours and is now in Rami, an unpromising area of factories and wholesalers above Eyup at the head of the Golden Horn. Its trilbyed
TURQUOISE I I I M A N U E L Ç IT A K
EATING OUT
patrons are almost as incongruous in the unsalubrious surroundings but everything is still carefully prepared as it should be, with waiters in ties and white coats and only the best olive oil used with the enginar (artichoke). Always a good sign, they adamantly refuse to serve patikan beğendi
(cubes of lamb with aubergine pure) out of season so that the gums always tingle pleasurably.
Hacı Salih is hidden off the main road in a narrow
shopping arcade in Beyoğlu. There are not many tables and the walls are painted an uncheerful salmon pink, yet even at 2pm the tables of departing diners are filled quickly by a regular clientele. Most of these have memories of the original Hacı Salih which for 40 years occupied much larger premises across the street until forced to close by high rent. The original owner’s name and piety — the title Hacı is awarded to pilgrims to Mecca — are still celebrated in the restaurant run by his son, Abdullah Movit.
The restaurant is quite restful as diners are properly preoccupied with the food. They sit with the characteristic slouch of someone trying to get the broth from a kuzu buğulama (braised lamb) from dish to mouth without mishap. Although the menu is small it changes daily and includes some exotic items, such as Circassion chicken (made properly here with dribbles of spiced walnut oil on top).
Unlike his father, the present owner does the cooking himself. It came as a shock to learn that the original Salih “could not cook an egg” despite an apprenticeship in Beyoğlu’s famous, although now defunct, Abdullah Restaurant. The present Mr Movit is not a Hacı and even takes the occasional drink, but says the most important quality of a restaurateur is to have a good heart.
Virtue is also advertised in the restaurant where Hacı Salih once set up shop — Hacı Abdullah. Like the original Had Salih, Hacı Abdullah is decorated with shelves of preserved fruit and vegetables. Although it seems impious to say so, the food at this interloper Hacı is not bad. In winter there is a very tasty ayva tatlısı (jellied quince) for afters, which is stuffed with walnuts.
It is not necessary to look far off the beaten track to find a decent lokanta. Even in the Kapalı Çarşı (the Covered Bazaar), there are places of refuge. Sevim has the ambience of a simple “outlaw” cafe in the enclosed streets of the bazaar and it is likely to attract professors from nearby Istanbul University as it is tourists fleeing aggressive salesmen.
The food is even more reliable in a small lokanta outside the Nuruosmaniye entrance. You walk into the sunlight along the main drag where all the gold jewellery stores are located and then turn left down the hill. Under the arches, in the actual foundations of the Nuruosmaniye Mosque is Subaşı, a small, busy establishment with all the ingredients that make a good lokanta.
Subaşı serves the familiar dishes according to season as well as a few to challenge the palate of the foreign visitor. This includes paça terbiyeli (or the “well-behaved sheep hoof’). It is a somewhat glutinous soup made from sheep’s trotters flavoured with garlic and thickened with the “well-behaved” binding of egg yoke mixed with lemon juice and vinegar. In this it resembles its cousin, tripe soup, another Turkish favourite.
Can Restaurant is both a rare find and rather difficult to
find. Return to the main jewellery store avenue and about halfway up there is an archway leading to the Kapalı Çarşı
114 TURQUOISE
Esnaf Derneği (the Covered Bazaar Craftsmen Association) whose members presumably figure among Can’s regular clientele. Through the arch immediately to the left is a flight of stairs up to a small tiled room with an arched ceiling and good food. The ekşi köfte, a soured creamy broth with meatballs, is excellent. There are even links with English provincial cooking — the çiftlik (farm) kebab is very like Lancashire hot-pot (although deeper in flavour with the hot spicy green pepper) and ciğer sarma is the nearest you get to a Turkish haggis.
Other tourist spots have restaurants frequented by people working nearby. Erol, not far from the Blue Mosque (near the bus stop and down the hill towards Cağaloğlu), is an old- fashioned lokanta with proper table-cloths and good food. Despite the apparent absence of regular clientele, Kardeşler, near the cluster of hotels in Lâleli close to the Ramada, has a rather pompous and fading decor but serves decent food, including an Ankara stew. Somewhat different from other dishes by the same name, it turned out to be braised lamb with an excellent accompaniment of pilav rice.
Kanaat in Üsküdar, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, is
worth the boat trip on a sunny day. It is a bright, high- ceilinged restaurant with lots of tables and pastel shades. There is something incongruous about finding black lacquered chairs in a traditional lokanta — a shock not dissimilar to the moment when Indian restaurants in London started discarding flock wallpaper for beige coloured walls.
The food is excellent, particularly the güveç, an individual ceramic dish of baked meat and vegetables. Also recommended in season is the cold celeriac cooked in olive oil and stuffed with vegetables. The sweets are good, particularly with a side ordering of Kanaat’s particularly fresh kaymak, or clotted cream.
In the attempt to find the opposite restaurant to Kanaat, a hole-in-the-wall whose only charcteristic was its food, I set out to rediscover a lokanta I had been taken to years ago to sample the staple of Turkish home cuisine, kuru fasulye,
dried white beans reconstituted and cooked in tomato and onion. The restaurant is easy to find as it is opposite the Süleymaniye Mosque, housed beneath the arches of the trading han (inns), which were part of the original foundation complex.
This restaurant is also called Kanaat. It seems its founder, Ali Korab, was a relative of the Kanaat across the water. He had moved to the Süleymaniye in 1953 after his premises elsewhere were destroyed by fire. The restaurant is now run by his nephew Adnan Bey.
Sitting in the sidewalk outside, hunched over a bowl of soupy kuru fasulye and looking at the buttress work of the Süleymaniye ahead, it is impossible not to realise the truly ephemeral nature of monumental religious architecture in comparison to the eternity represented in a well-cooked bean. □
Recorru.ıended Lokanta restaurants in İstanbul
Can Restaurant, Sorgüçlühan 19-24, Kapalı Çarşı • Hacı Abdullah,
Ağacamli Sakızağacı Caddesi 19, Beyoğlu • Hacı Salih Lokantası, Anadolu Han, Beyoğlu • Kanaat, Üsküdar • Kanaat, Süleymaniye •
Kardeşler, O rdu Caddesi 202, Lâleli • KonyalI, branchies at Sirkeci, Top^ıpı Palace, Levent|and Göztepe • Sevim Kahvehane, Kapalı Ç a rş ı» Subaşı Lezzet Lokantası, Carşıkapı, Nuruosmaniye Caddesi
Kişisel Arşivlerde İstanbul Belleği Taha Toros Arşivi
