Led by members of the Istanbul Eats team, the Kebab Krawl is a carefully curated nighttime feast of traditional southeastern Turkish cuisine that changes locations with every course, allowing you to take in the best of this atmospheric out-of-the-way ‘hood. The Krawl will begin with the gumbo-like masterpiece soup, beyran corbasi, and then detour for skewered liver from a 4^th generation Urfa griller. There will be a stop at a bakery for artisanal lahmacun straight out of the oven and then we’ll belly up to the kebab bar of Veysel usta, for his exceptionally delicious handmade kebabs, served up with sharp wit. We will not relent until the group has made one more stop, for the neighborhood’s best kunefe, a funky pastry of fresh cheese and crispy shredded wheat spiked with Antep pistachios. As it rolls along, the Kebab Krawl will also make stops at other local food and spice shops for a further taste of local flavor.

Less a tour than an organized movable feast for the hungry and intrepid, the Kebab Krawl may not replace a bus ticket to Urfa, but it is the next best thing.

The Kebab Krawl will be offered regularly starting in February. Please contact us at isteatswalks@gmail.com for more details.

We invite all of our readers to submit their most memorable Istanbul (or Turkey) dining moments of 2011. We will post your dispatches along with our own during the last two weeks of December. If possible, please include a photograph with all submissions, which should be sent to istanbuleats@gmail.com.

Our bazaar bag, meanwhile, is the ideal companion for those trips to the weekly produce bazaar (or, depending on where you live, the farmer’s market). Made out of sturdy canvas, this deep bag has more than enough room to hold all your shopping. And it’s stylish, to boot, its sides decorated with an original print by Istanbul-based artist Olga Alexopoulou. The bag costs $25.

To buy the book, click here. For the bag, click here.

Since the indoor smoking ban went into effect, outdoor seating has become even more prized on this street, a hot destination for revelry. While most businesses held permits for their outdoor seating area, violations of the space were clearly rampant. Over the past year, tables seemed to multiply like mushrooms overnight until finally, pedestrians were forced to pass in a single file line between the gauntlet of tables filled with diners, drinkers and smokers.

But this afternoon, police and municipal inspectors swept through, confiscating outdoor furniture and ordering the demolition of decks built outside of restaurants. A pile of rubble, previously a deck, stood just downhill from the stylish House Café, while across the street waiters worked frantically with crowbars to remove a particularly permanent looking structure.

Pushcart vendor Murat said, “This affects all of us. Who am I going to sell pogaca to if no one is outside? How can I live if I can’t make money? They’ve just killed Asmalimescit.”

But a waiter from Perentez café said, “Think about this, if there’s a fire and the trucks can’t get through the street. In two hours how many lives will be lost?” Located just off of Sofyali Sokak, Perentez, for now, remains one of the few bars in the area with outdoor seating.

According to a report in the daily Radikal, the Beyoglu municipality is responding to citizens’ complaints of the illegal blockage of streets and sidewalks. But today, on Sofyali Sokak where business owners, loyal customers and others stood in knots discussing the sweep. The murmur going through the crowd was “Tayyip,” as in Recep Tayyip Erdogan, indicating the Prime Minister as the hand behind the lightning brigades. According to one version of the rumor, the PM was incensed after his motorcade was unable one recent night to get through Beyoglu’s people-crowded narrow streets because of all the outdoor seating and gave the order for what could be dubbed Operation Table Clearing.

According to Bade, the owner of the ever-popular bar and café Badehane, the other night at around 11pm an ominous handwritten note was delivered saying, “Your use of the sidewalk has been cancelled.” Today Bade didn’t put any tables outside and doesn’t know how her business will survive. “We make all of our money in the summer thanks to our outdoor seating that I paid the Municipality for in advance. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to pay my rent. But I’m hopeful that we’ll find a solution.”

Around the corner on Asmali Mescit Caddesi, which was cleared out over the weekend, a shoeshine man sat in front of his large brass box as a deliveryman with a handtruck urged him to move out of the way. The shoeshine man shook his head and took another bite out of his sandwich, for now the last man in Asmalimescit still sitting outside.

Greeks and Turks have bickered for centuries over which nation makes the better baklava, a sticky-sweet dessert of layered pastry devoured in huge quantities across the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. But for the past 10 years, Turkey’s best-known producer, businessman Nadir Gullu, has been supplying Greece’s closely held Baklavas Epe, which operated five stores in Athens. He provided about two tons of baklava and other Turkish sweets per month.

Old rivalries aside, Athenians lapped them up—until, that is, they ran out of cash.

Baklavas Epe’s most profitable shop is on Athens’s landmark Syntagma Square. Before the crisis, tourists and locals queued up in droves to buy the pastries. But as the government embarked on a severe austerity program to reduce its debt burden and qualify for international support, demand sank.

Baklavas Epe closed three of its five stores in Athens as sales dropped. Meanwhile, it ratcheted up close to €160,000 (about $226,000) in debt for deliveries of sweets from across the Aegean Sea, according to the company. Plunging revenue made it impossible for Baklavas Epe to finance baklava purchases from Istanbul.

“Baklava has become a luxury. Think about it: Three kilos of minced beef costs the same as one kilo of baklava,” said a company spokesman. (A kilogram is about 2.2 pounds.)

In Turkish newspapers, Mr. Gullu, the owner of Karakoy Gulluoglu, a well-known baklava shop near the shores of the Bosporus in Istanbul, said the Greeks should pay their debts within a year and the business relationship was in jeopardy.

With elevated wage costs and sporadic vandalism amid protests over austerity measures adding to its woes, Baklavas Epe said it needed more time. Besides, it said, Mr. Gullu in public comments had exaggerated the amount of the debt. In short, it didn’t look good for business and friendship in the Greek-Turkish baklava trade.

Fortunately for the Greeks, Gullu has decided to cut them some slack by extending the amount of time they have to repay their loans. As part of the deal, it looks like the two companies will also open up a co-owned coffee shop in Athens. Full article here. And the Istanbul Eats review of Gulluoglu here.

Beyoglu officials, in their defense, have stated that it was simply a matter of forcing bar owners to replace old and worn-out furniture. We decided to check things out for ourselves and headed down to bustling Mis Sokak, home to numerous bars and cafes, to see what the barkeeps had to say. According to Derya of Nero Cafe on Mis Sokak, the municipal officers have been spreading the word for a while that two-person seats are a “visual nuisance.” So Nero had their benches cut into two pieces to dodge the wrath of the dreaded zabita. The owners of Bodega, across the street from Nero, were less lucky. They had their loveseats confiscated and damaged in the process.

“How can our seats be considered a visual nuisance? Are the Chinese stones that pave the street not a visual nuisance? How about that ugly new shopping mall on Istiklal?” Nero’s Muhamad Simsek of Cafe Nero told us.

“Banning these seats is the same philosophy as internet censorship,” he said, referring to the recent controversy over the Turkish government’s plan to create a mandatory filtering service for internet users. ”These two-person seats have a history of, like, 1000 years. And people have always wanted to sit next to each other.”

Unlike the whole loveseat story, that, at least, was something nobody could argue with.