Had we previously known the sound of the zirh blade’s rhythmic roll over large cuts of lamb, we could have followed our ears through the side streets, past the jewelers near Atik Ali Pasa Mosque to the brisk lunch in progress at this little kebab shop. In his open kitchen Vaha usta works the zirh, a scimitar-like heavy curved knife, on a thick wooden slab and it sounds like a steam engine chugging at full speed. Each day starts here with a pile of choice cuts of beef and lamb, the place closing down around five PM when the meat runs out. It has been that way since the mid-1970’s, when Şeyhmus  (pronounced “Shay-muhs,” like the Irish poet Heaney) himself was still working the counter.

Vaha usta cuts the meat fresh for each kebab depending on the customers preferences – fatty or lean, spicy or not – before wetting his hands and working it onto long skewers.  We chose the Mardin kebabi (fairly lean and spiked with green peppers) as a nod to the southeastern Turkish hometown of the late Şeyhmus usta, both of which are celebrated in large framed photos and posters all over the dining room.

Vaha usta, working at a frantic speed, barked an order at a young waiter playing with his cell phone. The boy pocketed the phone and quickly came to Vaha usta’s side with a napkin and cleaned up shreds of meat that had gone flying from the blade onto nearby tables. (Note to readers: select your table carefully or wear a raincoat.)

We enjoy swordplay at the lunch counter for the sake of entertainment, but a few bites of our Mardin kebab told us that this was not just a gimmick. The meat used at most kebab shops may be of fine quality, but it has usually been smooshed through a grinder once or twice leaving it a limp, pliable mound. Vaha’s zirh-cut lamb/beef combo came off of the skewer springy, with great textural variation. At certain points it still seemed to have a grain. People speak of zirh-cut meat having a particularly fresh taste and we got that. But it was the texture that impressed us most. This kebab made the average street-side Adana look like an Oscar Meyer wiener.

So entranced were we by the properties of this Mardin kebabi, the heavy roll of the zirh on the chopping block, the slap of fresh tirnakli ekmek (flatbread) coming out of the oven, the sight of meat flying through the air that we forgot to ask just how it was that an Irishman ended up making kebab in Mardin.

Address: Molla Fenari Mah., Medrese Sok. No:2, Çemberlitaş
Telephone: +902125261613

(photo by Ansel Mullins)

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. Decorated in a rustic utilitarian style, without even the embellishment of a wait staff, the center of attention here is the old oven, as it should be. Modified to burn gas a long time ago, Dilara restored the oven to its previous wood-burning glory, scalped a master baker from Antakya and the concept was born: traditional Turkish food prepared with a chef’s attention to detail and cooked by a true usta in the smoky, natural heat of the oven. That means lahmacun (we prefer the one with onion), pide (don’t miss the one with ground beef and pistachio), a daily guvec (i.e. dishes, from stews to white beans, slow cooked in a clay pot), a spinach and spicy Antakya cheese borek that is in a category all it’s own, and a rotating cast of traditional breads, including the old sesame-studded simit.  There are playful drinks on offer like Gazoz and little bottles of ayran, but we prefer to belly up for bottomless cay from the hulking samovar in the corner of the dining room.

Most days, Dilara works with Saban usta, who stands with a slight stoop, bringing him right to the height of the over door. For Dilara, the enterprise almost looks like an apprenticeship, with the veteran chef up to her elbows in ground lamb for tepsi kebab while the usta feeds the oven with a long wooden paddle. Turning away from Abracadabra’s arty fusion cuisine, chauffeured clientele and sweeping views to a business whose only assets are an oven and a delivery scooter might seem like an odd choice for an ambitious chef. But it’s one we applaud and sincerely hope to be indicative of a developing trend, one that sees greater cooperation between the traditional usta and the trained chef.

Within the strict boundaries of what constitutes traditional Turkish food, there is no magic sauce to fall back on. It’s all about technique and the quality of materials, subtleties that Dilara is not skimping on here. Rather than reinventing the baked bean, her kitchen is manipulating every detail to tap vast reserves of flavor that many similar businesses left back in their hometowns when they made their migration to Istanbul. What you get here is delicious village food fresh from the oven, served in Dilara’s way, and once again as spontaneous as when she first fed us eight years ago.

Datli Maya’s Facebook page probably does the best job of summing up what the restaurant is all about. Beside a photo of a dump truck delivering a pile of wood for the oven, it simply says: “If we have wood, we have fire and if we have fire, we can make lovely food!”

Address: Türkgücü Cad. No:59/A, Cihangir (Behind Firuzaga Mosque)
Telephone: +902122929057
Web: www.datlimaya.com
Open everyday 8am-midnight

(photo by Monique Jaques)

This was supposed to be a quick run down to the Karakoy hardware market for a faucet and some sandpaper, but our culinary backstreets antenna, always up, automatically changed the the afternoon’s priorities. So we followed the commotion to a tiny restaurant called Urfa Şark Sofrasi and pulled up a stool outside of this humble kebab shop.

The owner, Saim bey, convinced us to start with kurufasuliye, which was kept warm in a charred clay pot at the front. More famous in the Turkish Northeast and Central Anatolian regions, these beans were done in the Black Sea style with meat and plenty of butter, but also delivering a little extra kick of heat, that we attributed to the place’s link to Urfa, home of the diabolical isot, an oily, almost black dried and crushed red pepper.

Faced with the difficult task of choosing between a list of kebab, we ordered a mixed grill platter that included kanat (chicken wings), patlicanli kebab (minced lamb sheesh interrupted by thick slices of eggplant), and a kebab called haşhaş (pronounced, “hash hash”), which was as intoxicating as the name indicates. The meat was buried under mounds of fresh bread slathered with a spicy rub, rolls of soft lavash and spicy green peppers and tomatoes hot off of the grill. Working our way through the platter we kept seeking out chunks of the particularly crumbly, crispy yet soft sheesh. Finding the last piece hiding under a triangle of lavash, we asked Saim bey what we were eating.

“That’s hashas kebabi, knife-cut beef with lamb fat, super!” he said.

Super indeed, we agreed – even bleat-worthy.

Address: Persembe Pazari Caddesi, Keresteci fazil sokak 4, Karakoy
Telephone: +902122496963

(photo by Ansel Mullins)

Merih, in fact, is the polar opposite of most of its neighbors, a homey refuge for neighborhood locals looking for good food without too much fuss (and without paying too much). Like a good Italian trattoria or French Bistro, Merih is the kind of place that you wouldn’t think twice about dropping into for a quick – or extended – meal, with friendly yet professional service, top-notch food and affordable booze to wash it down with.

In business since 1972, Merih very much evokes that era, the walls lined with wood paneling, a large painting of a dapper Mustafa Kemal Ataturk prominently displayed, and long rows of raki bottles lined up on shelves like trophies. While the restaurant may be a meyhane, most of Merih’s regulars do away with the meze tray business and head straight to the kitchen in the back, where a small steam table holds an assortment of prepared dishes and a large glass-lined cooler displays the day’s appetizers and a selection of meats ready to be grilled.

Merih may be low-key, but its kitchen means business, turning out superb renditions of meyhane classics. The restaurant’s pilaki (white beans in a tomato sauce) was among the finest we’ve had in a long time, the not-too-soft beans having a very satisfying bite to them, the sauce they were in amped up by a generous amount of garlic. An order of fresh spinach stewed in olive oil, served with a dollop of tangy yogurt, showed the same level of attention to taste. Sigara boregi (phyllo dough wrapped around tangy white cheese) are often brought to the table looking as if they had been fried in motor oil salvaged from an auto repair shop. Here they came out golden, crisp and utterly delicious. Our main course, lamb kebab, was another highlight, the meat tender, juicy and expertly grilled. Even dessert, a traditional milk pudding flavored with mastic, seemed to pack an extra gustatory punch.

We finished our dinner feeling deeply satisfied and thinking Merih is the kind of place we could come back to every day. We suspect that is exactly what many of the other folks eating there that night actually do.

Address: Kamer Hatun Cad. No: 5/A
Telephone: +90-212-245-4325

(photo by Ansel Mullins)

(Editor’s Note: In almost a decade of intrepid eating in Istanbul, we still miss the immigrant community restaurants we know from the American big cities where language barriers and foreign customs make a lunch into a real adventure. Istanbul has foreign communities and it has foreign restaurants but the two rarely seem to meet. It wasn’t until we visited Zeytinburnu that what we were looking for, Little Uighurstan.)

Thwap. Thwap. Thwap.

“Do you hear that?” asked Sean Roberts, an expert on Uighur culture and politics and our dining companion for the day. “They’re making the lagman.”

As if inspired by the image of a pizza-maker spinning dough on his finger like a basketball and tossing it in the air, lagman-makers have a similar choreography that includes a deep swing, a flip and a smack of the thick braid of noodles. But unlike pizza dough, lagman noodles have escaped mass production; they are handmade by definition. As fat and chewy as udon at certain points and thin like spaghetti at others, a bowl of lagman is full of surprises. The generous topping of sautéed finely-chopped lamb, fresh red and green peppers that came with the suyru lagman (guyru lagman comes with a more chunky variety of the same ragu) was a delicious and spicy change of pace from the milder Turkish palate.

“This is a good lagman. I’m sweating,” said Roberts.

The location of these thwapping noodles was Zeytinburnu, an Istanbul neighborhood that seems almost as far off of the beaten path as the Silk Road oasis of Kashgar. The last stop on the tramway, it’s a busy little district with a pleasant central pedestrian boulevard lined with that particular style of concrete blocks present throughout all Turkish cities, architectural non-sequiturs. At street level on the main drag, it seems this area is all about the trade of leather jackets, much like the shopping streets of Laleli and Aksaray. But look a little closer and you’ll notice banners in Arabic script and blue and white star and crescent flags in upper level windows, an old-timer with a long stringy beard strolling down the main street in a black velvet skull cap with embroidered totems, the signs of a coherent community of people from a place in the west of China described as Eastern Turkistan, the Uighur of Zeytinburnu.

Often idealized in Turkey as the proto-Turks, the Uighur have enjoyed a privileged status since the 1950’s and their community in Zeytinburnu has steadily grown since then. Though it’s increasingly difficult to leave China and enter Turkey these days, newcomers still arrive regularly, like the cook at Turkestani Restaurant, who took our order with a bashful smile and not a word of Turkish.

We visited three Uighur restaurants in Zeytinburnu, sampling the large Uighur-style manti dumplings, somsa, a savory pastry stuffed with lamb and, of course, lagman. The food was all very good, but it was the scene that captured our attention. We were reminded of tight-knit communities in Queens or the West Bank of New Orleans, where restaurants play a key role in cultural preservation. At one spot, Pan-Turkic newspapers were stacked on one table, while the soft lilt of the Uighur language filtered through a privacy screen where a mother fed her children Kashgar kebab and teenagers gathered around a huge flat-screen to watch a Uighur crooner’s concert DVD.  At Ipek Yolu, another of the neighborhood’s restaurants, we even met the director of a local Uighur kindergarten.

In Istanbul, foreign communities rarely settle and thrive the way the Uighur have, so foreign restaurants rarely feel – or taste – authentic. But in Zeytinburnu, rest assured, there is a Uighur at the next table keeping the cook honest. The lagman will be as fresh and tasty as it is in Kashgar. And the noodles will always be audibly handmade.

Turkistan Restaurant
Address: 63 Sokak #5, Zeytinburnu
Telephone: (212) 547-3822

Urumci Lokantasi
Address: 50/5 Sokak #3, Zeytinburnu
Telephone: (212) 665-2813

Ipek Yolu Restaurant
Address: 60^th Sokak 28 (behind Ziraat Bankasi two blocks back, on the right), Zeytinburnu
Telephone: (530) 923-4088

Although this soup is probably best drunk at its source, we’ve recently come across a spot in Istanbul that serves up a very fine bowl of beyran – and not just for breakfast. Located in the bustling Aksaray neighborhood, Ehli Kebap is a grill house who’s advertised specialty is skewered liver in the style of Diyarbakir, a city a few hours to the east of Gaziantep. But tucked into the restaurant’s corner is a soup master with some serious Gaziantep chops who has his own cooking station – gaily festooned with strings of dried red peppers – devoted to beyran making.

Each serving of soup is made to order, cooked up inside its own metal bowl, the usta creating it like a kind of hot and soupy ice cream sundae. First up is a schmear of suet, the shortening-like fat found around the kidney of a sheep, to give the soup some silkiness. Piled on top of that is a mound of white rice and strands of lamb meat that has been slow-cooked for hours, until it is utterly tender, which give the soup its heft. To ratchet up the taste, the usta then adds a dollop of minced garlic to the bowl, and tops the whole thing with liberal sprinkles of light and dark red-pepper flakes. The bowl is then put on a blazing gas burner and a ladleful of broth of an unfathomable depth of flavor is added to it, the whole thing coming to a quick boil. By the time the beyran soup arrives at the table, it has achieved a lovely rusty red color, looking – and even tasting – something like a Turkish version of a Louisiana gumbo.

We generally don’t get too excited about soup, but recent visits to Ehli Kebap to sample their beyran have left us thinking that this may be among the finest soups we’ve had in town, something we would be more than happy to slurp down on a daily basis – breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Address: Simitçi Şakir Sokak 32, Aksaray
Telephone: (212) 631-3700

(photo by Yigal Schleifer)

Click here for a list of some of our favorites.

Entering through the hall lined with photos of esteemed guests our attention hung on the huge wall-covered grotto, the likes of which we haven’t seen outside of natural history museums. We won’t get into the ceramic bas-reliefs of Anatolian construction through the ages featuring Greek temples, Ottoman mosques and soaring office towers that adorn the other walls, or other such subtle details. Let the over-the-topness of the grotto – with its stuffed doe and gurgling brook – stand as a symbol for the glory of all things at Has Kral, including the food.

Looking at the menu, we spotted many similarities to one of our favorite restaurants, Akdeniz Hatay Sofrasi, which also serves the cuisine of Turkey’s Hatay area, near the southern border with Syria. Has Kral has the metrelik kebab, sheesh served by the meter, a sporting man’s choice. We also noticed the hallmark of Hatay whimsy, chicken or lamb baked in a salt dome and set ablaze at the table. Both are excellent at Akdeniz, but require advance order so we couldn’t sample Has Kral’s version.

We started our meal with a number of meze that we know and love from the Hatay kitchen – a zingy zahtar (fresh thyme) salad, fattush, or green salad riddled with crunchy fried pide chips, and lubnan ezmesi, which combined a salty soft cheese with roasted eggplant yogurt and dried red peppers. The starters, along with one of our favorite guilty pleasures between courses, icli kofte, were delicious.

Selecting from the list of kebabs is an overwhelming part of a meal at Has Kral. However poetic, items with names like “the dance of kebab” didn’t help us make a decision. We asked the waiter to translate the list into plain kebab language and settled on one of the specials, featuring an assortment of three kebabs. Here’s where Has Kral earned its crown.

Two of the three kebabs were shockingly good. The third, a çöp şiş, was very good by any normal measure but paled in comparison to its compatriots on the plate. One of those, made of fatty ground lamb shot through with bright green pistachios and shreds of red pepper, was crumbly and almost sweet. We found its partner, bursting with pine nuts, so moist and delicious that we thought we might be hallucinating. But that’s the Has Kral experience – trippy, down to the last detail.

There is a tempting desert menu, including candied unripe eggplants and walnuts, but by the end of the kebab course the atmosphere of Has Kral can get a little heavy. We suggest wandering the little streets around Has Kral, , in search of that perfectly plain kunefe shack. They are out there and we find kunefe, a traditional kebab house desert of shredded pastry and cheese soaked in syrup, is somehow sweeter when sitting on a rickety stool on the sidewalk, rather than when being stared down by a stuffed doe perched on a concrete grotto.

Address: Ragib Bey sok. 25/A, Aksaray
Telephone: (212) 534-9707
Web: http://www.haskralsofrasi.com/

On a recent stroll down Istiklal Caddesi, we spotted the newly opened Asmali Canim Cigerim, featuring Ilhan Usta at the grill, and smelled a story. For years, we’ve been getting our liver fix at a restaurant of the same exact name just around the corner in the Asmalimescit area. So we decided to stop in for some grilled liver and gossip.

We immediately recognized a few of the old crew standing awkwardly at a long grill with a funhouse mirror over the hood that distorted one’s body, making us all look like plump sausages. Refugees from the leafy garden of the Asmalimescit location, we stood uncomfortably in the bluish light of the new shop’s energy efficient lighting trying to act as if nothing had changed.

What happened?

It took some prodding, but eventually, the manager explained that Ilhan Usta, the grill master whose name and presumably wisdom were behind the ever-tasty liver at the original spot, had a falling out with his old boss. The two decided to go their separate ways, Ilhan Usta taking his name and the owner of the old shop keeping the liver business alive under the name Asmali Canim Cigerim.

As the story unraveled, we wrapped five skewers of freshly grilled liver with the contents of about a dozen small plates of bitter greens, onion with sumac and ezme. Our hands worked automatically, sliding tender juicy liver bits off of the skewer with a handful of thin lavash, then loading it with crisp arugula. But while the crew here seems to have transplanted the flavor of the old Canim Cigerim, the vibe was distinctly different. Perhaps it was the absence of the “asma” (the “Asmali” part of the name promises vine-laden pergola), making us think of a biergarten with no garten.

Days later, we went back to the old Canim Cigerim — the one with the garden and outdoor seating — and found the liver much as it had been before Ilhan Usta’s departure. Many of the old staff seemed to have survived the schism. On a Wednesday afternoon it was bumping, business as usual.

As we polished off our liver, our thoughts strayed back to the exodus of Ilhan Usta after ten years of manning the grill at the old spot. It must have been quite a row that actually ripped the name of the place in two — one owner maintaining the pergola and the other keeping the title of Ilhan usta.

For weeks, we were still troubled by the split and where we stood on the subject. If the liver is roughly the same in quality, where did our loyalty rest: with the usta or with the place filled with warm memories?

We discussed the situation with a local vendor of pirated DVD’s, who also happeneds to be a former kebapci. He said, “Look, Canim Cigerim kept the same green grocer, same butcher, same waiters. So what’s the difference? Ilhan usta is just a brand. He’s not sitting at the grill you know.”

We found peace in this former grillman’s insight. Once a successful kitchen is set up, it doesn’t require the grandmaster of liver to keep it going. On the contrary, it would take the determination of a new boss to ruin that kitchen. So, in the end, we didn’t have to take sides in the battle for Canim Cigerim. We remain loyal only to good liver, wherever it may be found.

Asmali Canim Cigerim, Ilhan Usta
Address: Istiklal Caddesi 162, Beyoglu
Telephone: (212) 243-1005

Asmali Canim Cigerim
Address: Minare Sokak 1, Beyoglu
Telephone: (212) 252-6060

(photo by Ansel Mullins)

(Editor’s Note: This guest post is by Jeffrey Gibbs, an American writer and teacher living in Kadikoy whose personal blog can be found here.)

I stumbled home from a day of managing wild middle schoolers and started to open the fridge for a medicating Efes Dark only to find a magnet near the handle that read, “Gilan Cafe, Iranian Cuisine. Kadıköy.”

I did a double take. Yes, yes, it said Iranian. Iranian! How long have I searched for a decent Iranian restaurant in Istanbul? The address was just up the road and so my fiance and I hit the sidewalk and after about five measly minutes, found the unpreposssessing little cafe tucked among the apartment buildings of the Acibadem neighborhood.

The cafe had an outdoor patio with heaters and a cozy room inside simply decorated with red table clothes and pictures of Persopolis. Among Darius’s ruins, a new display of framed newspaper clippings sang the praises of the little restaurant. In the background, Iranian music by the famous Persian musician, Hayde, played from a laptop manned by our waiter.

We were soon met by Fetihan, a sharp, down-to-earth woman who had lived for thirty years with her Iranian husband in the Gilan province of Iran (thus the restaurant’s name). “It was like the Iranian Black Sea,” she told us. “With the blue water of the Caspian Sea in front of you and the mountains at your back. Ahhh, a gorgeous place.” We ordered a starter of “Ashe Doogh”—billed as “Ayran Soup” in Turkish. It was a hearty, creamy yogurt based soup with tiny meat balls, fava beans, rice, and a hint of herbs. A swirl of bright green thyme oil adorned the top. Fetihan also brought out a complimentary salad of mint, cucumbers and tomatoes with a basket of thin lavash bread.

For my main dish, I order fesenjan, a rich walnut and pomengranate sauce over slow cooked köfte. It is served, as is everything else, with a plate of Persian rice. My fiance goes with ghormeh sebze, a creamy spinach based dish that reminds me of Indian saag. It has chicken, peas, and tiny köfte, with a rich sauce flavored with dill, cumin, and a diminuitive Persian lime.

“All of my ingredient from the spices to the lime come directly from Iran,” Fetihan explains. “You can’t find this kind of rice in Turkey.”

The rice was wonderful—a pillow of white with a sprinkling of bright yellow grains flavored with saffron. Unlike Turkish rice, our hostess tells us, Persian rice is cooked without oil because you are supposed to pour the sauces of your main dish on top. For drinks, we had Iranian ayran, a chilled version of Turkey’s classic yogurt drink flavored with crushed herbs. It was light, creamy, and refreshing.

My fiance, being Kurdish, pointed out all the similarities between the Persian dishes and Kurdish ones. One menu item is called Ab Ghosht, in Kurdish Av Goşt—“Meat in Sauce.” The dessert was Zerde—“yellow” in both Kurdish and Farsi. We ordered one and found ourselves treated to a bowl of a saffron flavored custard topped with pomengranate seeds and green pistachios. As with a Turkish meal, our Iranian one was finished off with a glass of hot tea.

The second time we went, Fetihan’s son was on hand. His enthusiasm and knowledge of Iranian ingredients and culture was infectious. He had set up a traditional Newroz table in the front of the restaurant with the 7 S’s, as he called them, or haft sin in Farsi. The sacred seven include sir (garlic), somaq (sumak), sib (apples), and senjed an Iranian fruit symbolizing love. He also brought out a bowl of candy coated coriander seeds which had a wonderful flavor when eaten with the strong Persian tea.

The restaurant may not be located in the heart of Istanbul, but it’s easily reached with a minibus or a taxi from Kadıköy wharf—or by a twenty minute walk (it’s near the Kadıköy Carrefour). It’s worth the journey; Fetihan puts a level of care into her creations that is reminiscent of Çiya.

Good international cuisine in Istanbul needs support—there’s so little of it and what exists is often overpriced and overrated. Fetihan serves delicious meals at normal prices with a generous spirit. Go. Eat. Tell others.

Address: Umut Sok. 3/D, Acıbadem/Kadıköy
Telephone: (216) 325-6615
Web: www.gilancafe.com