Browsing by Category: Istanbul

In the interest of full disclosure I will put it right out there: Kantin’s chef Şemsa Denizsel is a close friend and I am writing this post from the comfort of her home. In other words, this won’t exactly be my standard anonymous review. That said, I loved Şemsa’s cooking and bold personality long before (more…)

Two things have the power to get my friends and me up before dawn: the prospect of offal for breakfast and food markets. The former is a custom in Southeastern Anatolia, but we were in Istanbul last Sunday, so it was the latter that got Semsa and I out of our beds and into a taxi bound for (more…)

There are plenty of things to love about Turkish regional cuisine. My favorite? The rampant use of offal-based breakfast soups. The practice of eating these hearty bowls early in the morning is particularly common in eastern Anatolia, but you can find plenty of it in Istanbul’s Fatih district, where immigrants (more…)

With a storefront like this, I shoulda known.

You know how sometimes your iPhone camera doesn’t do a subject justice? In the right light it does a pretty good job. But other times, it just doesn’t come close to capturing the true nature of what you’ve witnessed. That happened to me on Saturday at Datlı Maya, a well liked and inexplicably popular cafe in Istanbul’s Cihangir. My good ol’ (more…)

Kağıthane paper shop in Istanbul sells a lot of, well, paper. But the store stocks a far more precious and interesting product: Santimetre‘s handmade porcelain objects for everyday use. I popped into the Nişantaşı branch of the shop last week. I was looking for note cards, which I did not find (they sell every paper novelty imaginable (more…)