(Editor’s Note: In honor of New Year’s Day, we are rerunning this feature, which was originally posted in April of this year. Happy New Year to all our readers and keep coming back for more in 2010!)

Until visiting some of Istanbul’s shrines to the baked bean, we generally regarded the dish as something eaten out of a can beside railroad tracks. But Turkey takes this humble food seriously; that means chefs in tall toques carefully ladling out golden beans in a rich red gravy onto monogrammed flatware, served by waiters wearing bowties and vests. Even in the least formal of Istanbul’s beaneries, the guy manning the pot has the air of a high priest knowing that his incantations alone conjure something unusually delicious out of a simple dry white legume. This is no hobo fare.

There are two general schools of bean cooking in Turkey: Black Sea and Anatolian. Beans Black Sea-style sit in a red gravy so thick with butter and laden with chunks of meat that we eat it with a fork and a hearty piece of bread. Anatolian beans, often known as Erzincan beans, are soupier and cooked in a tomato-based sauce without butter and meat.  Either way you can’t go wrong.

The following are three of our favorite bean joints in town:

Fasuli Lokantasi

The beans at Fasuli Lokantasi glow unbelievably orange, as if the chef slipped a little something radioactive in the pot. Whatever the recipe, these beans are among the best we’ve had in Istanbul. Stiffened by a whole lot of butter, the gravy and bean almost achieve the same creamy consistency. The cool crisp raw onions and pickled hot peppers are a welcomed balance to the richness of the dish, although their aroma stays with you long after your meal.  Host to a loyal lunch crowd, this white table cloth establishment serves up other Black Sea specialties including muhlama, a sort of Turkish fondue, stuffed chard leaves, and corn bread. The location, across the street from Tophane’s nargile cafes and near the Karakoy waterfront, is an added bonus.

Address: Iskele Cad. 10-12, Tophane
Telephone: 212-243-6580
Web: www.fasuli.com.tr

Çomlek

At Çomlek you can’t miss the huge red clay cauldron sitting behind the counter. The fellow with the big ladle says it’s the pot that makes these beans better than the rest. Cooking vessel aside, a serving of these beans also has the highest meat count of any place we’ve visited in Istanbul. Whereas most beans might have a shred or at best a few nuggets of tender roasted beef in there for flavor, Çomlek’s are crowned by generous helping of meat. In such a rich dish the meat offsets the cloying beans satisfyingly, leaving the meek still able to walk away and the strong-willed able order up another half portion. The restaurant, located on the wooded slopes above Uskudar on the Asian side, is a bit out of the way. But for us, these are beans at their best and worth the trip.

Address: Turistik Cad. 28, Çamlica
elephone: 216-316-2953
Web: www.comlek.com.tr

Erzincanlı Ali Baba

According to historians, Tiryaki Sokak – Addicts Alley – got its name from the opium served up in its coffee houses in Ottoman times. Though that substance has been long banned, since 1924 Ali Baba has been ladling out something equally addictive from a great copper pot: Erzincan-style baked beans. Ingredients such as onion, tomato and chili pepper are more recognizable in the soupy base; the bean bigger than its Black Sea counterpart. Though we remain junkies of the Black Sea variety, the Erzincan preparation is a nice change of pace and there’s no better place to try a bowl than sitting on Ali Baba’s squat stools in the shadow of the minarets of the sublime Suleymaniye mosque.

Address: Prof. Sıddık Sami Onar Cad. No:11 Süleymaniye/İstanbul
Telefon: 212 – 513 62 19
Web: http://www.kurufasulyeci.com

Where Beyoglu slopes down towards the Bosphorus in Tophane, a rough-around-the-edges district named after a nearby Ottoman-era cannon factory, there’s not much in the way of swanky eating. Judging by the great piles of husks on the sidewalk, sunflower seeds are the dietary staple of the neighborhood. Well, that and a spicy flatbread called lahmacun (pronounced lah-ma-joon).

Over at Ismael Kebapcısı, owner Ismael smiles broadly from his post by a blackened stone oven. He’s always got a little dough on him, and at lunchtime he’s making it hand over fist. Ismael grills up mincemeat kebabs and chicken sheesh, but he clearly takes most pleasure in plucking a small handful of dough, dusting it with flour and rolling it out matzo-thin on the marble slab before him. He pats on top of it a fine spread of ground meat, tomato, onion, red pepper paste and spices and then shoves it deep into the hearth with a long paddle. That’s about all there is to a preparing a lahmacun.

There have got to be a dozen other lahmacun makers within a four-block radius of Ismael. You may ask, “Why is this lahmacun different from all other lahmacun?”

“Because I think positively!” Ismael explained one day, twinkling eyes lit by a clear sense of duty.

We’re not inclined to doubt Ismael on that point. Positive thinking goes a long way in the kitchen and the proof is sitting right there on the end of his paddle. And Ismael is not the only one who thinks positively about his lahmacun. Around lunchtime, as fast as he can turn them out, Ismael passes steaming lahmacun to a delivery boy who sprints off to waiting customers.

The commercial strip that’s home to Ismael’s restaurant is teaming with esnaflar, or the offices of small businessmen, who can be famously finicky about what they eat and how much they pay for it. Everyone seems to approve of his creations, although some prefer the lahmacun found at Yoremiz Pide, a bakery tucked back in the neighborhood. Their more heavily laden lahmacun is certainly worth a try, particularly if combined with a visit to next door Tutun Deposu, a former tobacco warehouse turned art gallery.

Though it might resemble a wafer-thin, cheese-less pizza when it emerges from the oven, think of lahmacun as a kind of wrap. Before the roll, the lahmacun is loaded with a mound of fresh cut parsley and an optional squeeze of lemon. A bite of this is at once spicy and tart, hot and cold, smoky and fresh, crispy and chewy. Such simple contrasts add up to a very complex snack. One of Istanbul’s best street eats we think, positively!

Ismail Kebapcısı
Address: Bogazkesen Caddesi #11, Tophane Beyoglu
Telephone: 0212 244 1178

Yoremiz Pide
Address: Luleci Hendek Caddesi #14, Tophane Beyoglu
Telephone: 0212 249 8272

Tophane Tütün Deposu
Address: Lüleci Hendek Cad. #12

(Photo by Monique Jaques)