YEME İÇME
Balik ekmek off a boat, kebap that is not what it is abroad, meyhane rules and cay all day. Where the queue is local.
Balık ekmek — a grilled fish fillet in half a loaf with onion and lettuce — off one of the boats at Eminönü, standing up, looking at the bridge. It costs very little and it is the emblematic Istanbul street meal.
The word covers a large family of grilled dishes that mostly arrive on a plate with bread, salad and sometimes yoghurt, not wrapped in one. If you want it wrapped, ask for a dürüm. The regional specialities — Adana, Urfa, İskender — are different dishes rather than different sizes.
A meyhane is a rakı house, and eating in one has a shape: cold meze first, chosen from a tray, then hot meze, then perhaps grilled fish, over several hours. It is not a place to be efficient in. Rakı is drunk with water and ice, which turns it white.
Çay arrives in a tulip glass, all day, everywhere, and refusing it is harder than accepting it. Turkish coffee is a small strong cup with grounds in the bottom — do not drink the last centimetre. Breakfast, kahvaltı, is a large spread of cheese, olives, eggs, jam and bread, and a proper one on a weekend morning is a meal worth planning a day around.
Off the main streets. A place with a photographic menu in six languages on Divan Yolu is not where anyone from here eats. Walk two streets back from anything famous.
Balık ekmek is grilled or fried fish in half a loaf of bread, sold from boats moored along the Eminönü waterfront on the Golden Horn, just west of the Galata Bridge. You order at a window on the boat, hand over cash, and walk away with a sandwich. The trap starts after that: a table … Read more
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