Monday

Datli Maya: Oven of Wonders

About eight years ago, in a cozy little dining room off of an open kitchen, we first encountered the chef Dilara Erbay, who, in her trademark Turko-English patois, barked orders at us and her kitchen staff, thoroughly charmed our table and, most importantly, created delicious, inspired food. Sticking close to traditional Turkish recipes with a subtle tweak or two, our meal that night felt entirely spontaneous, at a time when dining out in Istanbul was mostly predictable. The restaurant had a name but it was really just Dilara’s place to experiment with whatever she picked up from the market that day. She’d promote the night’s creations by SMS messages filled with exclamation points and made-up words. Its location, on the tacky French Street, was not even enough to deter us from becoming regular customers until its final days.

Dilara then surfaced for a short tenure in the kitchen of Cezayir, a grand space just around the corner from her old place on French Street. Her touch was apparent for a while but it quickly faded with her departure. Then at Abracadabra, the behemoth on the Bosphorus – complete with a merchandise line – that was her next venture, we saw bright, encouraging moments – usually when Dilara was in the kitchen for the night – eclipsed by stormy mismanagement. The entrée side of the menu featured a troubled marriage of Turkish and Thai, but the starters were all classic Dilara material. The fragrance of her cinnamon-laced Armenian rice, in essence stuffed mussels without the shell, stays with us to this day. But the restaurant never seemed fully settled. It’s closing, though certainly a low moment, must have been of some relief to Dilara’s fans and perhaps even to the chef herself.

Most recently, we started getting Facebook messages in that familiar Dilara-speak (eg. “…kurufasuliye, hot n sexy”) sent from a place called Datli Maya, the itinerant chef’s latest project, housed in an old Cihangir simit bakery that she recently purchased. Continue…