Friday

Mehmet Ercik’s Sucuk Sandwich Stand: Top Dog

Just as London’s Savile Row is known for its tailors, and New York’s Canal Street for its cheap handbags, Kadirgalar Caddesi in Istanbul is surely known to all as sucuk central. On any given evening, in this street running between the hills of Maçka Park and the nearby Acikhava Tiyatrosu, or open air theater, the sidewalks are alive with itinerant sausage stands. And one weekend, we tried them all.

Sucuk is a dried sausage eaten throughout the region surrounding Turkey, with slight variations on the same theme of ground beef, spiked with salt, red pepper, and other spices. Prior to hitting the grill, it is not the most appetizing sight, usually found hanging from hooks in supermarkets and butcher shops in uniform crimson links that look like a beaded curtain of very fat hotdogs. But once relieved of its paperlike casing, chopped into bite-size chunks and put on the grill, you understand what all of the fuss is about. The charcoal fire quickly revives the sausage from its sheathed slumber into sizzling disks that let off an aroma trail that can bring traffic to a standstill, as it does on Kadirgalar Caddesi. Continue…