Istanbul's Inflated Economy

Anatolian gözelme grannies at the Bakirköy Market

This blog began in 2006 as a newsletter to friends and family about our time in Istanbul. Fumie was working for an travel guidebook which let us spend several months living in the Galata neighborhood of Beyoglu, enough time for us to feel at home in the city and for me to pick up enough Turkish to make basic conversation. Looking through those first blog posts I am still shocked at how affordable Istanbul was. Lunch could be had for a dollar, and three dollars got you a full meal served on a tablecloth. That is no longer the situation. The Turkish economy is in crisis, and inflation has raised Turkish prices. Not prohibitively expensive for the traveler, but for Turkish citizens the cost of living has exploded. For Turks, a generation of dreams has collapsed. 

Istanbullites eat out a lot, and they have ever since it was Byzantium. Its a big city and people can't go home for lunch. People pick up a bite for breakfast on the way to work, and tradesmen's cafes - called Esnaf Lokanta - serve cheap, filling lunches during the day. Snacking is considered a basic right to all Turks, but that döner kebab that was a dollar back in 2006 can now hit eight dollars and up, while the average Turkish wage is basically the same as it was years ago. If you read history, going all the way back to the Byzantines, Istanbul has always been a poster child for urban economic problems. Istanbullites are tough and cynical about it. Hell, they survived the Fourth Crusade, they can survive this.

The explanation for what brought the Turkish economy to this sorry state lies with the increasingly undemocratic rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Like his close friend Viktor Orban in Hungary, Erdogan runs a performative democracy in which processes like elections are held giving the appearance of democracy, but without the mechanisms - free expression, free press, civil society - that feed a democratic process. Erdogan, like Orban, has zero patience for political rivals - last May Erdogan had Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu arrested on hazy charges of corruption, sparking mass demonstrations leading to riots. Whatever can be said of Erdogan, however, he is not an economist. Playing to a religious conservatism that runs contrary to the secular traditions of Kemal Ataturk, Erdogan promoted the idea that banking interest is "un-Islamic" and during his time in office he has repeatedly fired the heads of the Turkish national bank, each firing lowering confidence among foreign investors on which Turkey depends.  This video  (by a former CNN reporter) does a pretty good job of explaining what happened to the Turkish lira in the last few years and how it affects travellers..

Bakirköy Pazar

The resulting economic turmoil led Turkey to an 83% inflation rate in 2022, which hit Turks where it hurts: in the stomach. Today the inflation rate still stands at around 35%.  Given the government controls on free press (there are a lot of Turkish journalists in prison) the Turkish general populace takes to social media to express itself. My Instagram feed is full of examples of Turkish meat porn, a wide ranging genre featuring smiling Anatolian chefs offering mounds of steaming, juicy sliced meat to the camera lens. Some of my favorite Turkish cooking videos are the ones where big muscled guys with moustaches work up a few kilos of lamb in the back room of a butcher shop, grill up the results and stand around tasting the results like satisfied wine experts discussing a vintage. And people can express themselves freely about the price of food.  

House made döner at Abdulkadir in Bakirköy : 80% veal, 20% lamb

What I have noticed is that more and more Turkish food videos are focused on cheaper foods that can be had in local grocery stores: grilled cheese sandwiches, chick peas wrapped in flatbread, foods sold from street carts like the ubiquitous chicken, chickpea and rice or gözelme pancakes. Comments on the clips are largely shock about prices, especially for common lunch items like köfte kebab and döner. Meat has gotten pricey. A downtown döner kebab lunch can be as much as a full service pit roast lamb dinner in the Kadinlar Pazar. Carefully choosing can keep costs down. 

Cheap and filling: Beans over chicken and pilav

For a tourist, Istanbul can still be negotiated on a budget. We no longer choose to stay near the downtown. We took advantage of the Turkish Airlines stopover program, which offers a night free in a five star hotel if your flight connects in Istanbul - two nights if you a flying from a long distance (like the USA). We added two extra nights to that by contacting the hotel directly, and got a 50% reduced rate for two extra nights. Our neighborhood - Bakirköy on the sea just outside the old city walls - was a normal part of Istanbul. No tourists, a few universities, a busy shopping district, malls, mosques, and a stop on the new Marmaray train line to downtown Istanbul. 

As you wander north of the Marmaray rail station towards Incirli  you hit the Bakirkoy Market on Thursday and Saturdays. Municipal Bazaars like this operate all over Istanbul on different days of the week: this is how Istanbullites deal with the economy. Home goods, clothing, second hand tools, its all here for a song. Crowds gobble down gözelme Anatolian pancakes stuffed with meat, spinach, or cheese, made in front of you by real Turkish grandmas for 70 Turkish lira (about $1.75) Among the things that followed us home was an entirely affordable modern Afghan kilim rug. A similar piece downtown cost 100% more. 

The nearby neighborhoods of Incirli and Gungören  are known locally as "Little Gaziantep" - home to a  Anatolian internal immigrants from the Gaziantep region in southern part of Turkey, a region known for its uncompromising traditional cuisine. Yes, we took advantage. Antep cooking is militantly conservative: bread must be fresh, kebabs must be just so, and dessert must be like grandma used to make.

In "Little Gaziantep"

For our first night in Bakirköy, after a ten hour flight and an hour taxi ride from Istanbul Airport, we already knew where we were having dinner: Çevre İskender Kebap Lahmacun Salon a small all night kebab place a few blocks away from our hotel. We have been there before. Pure Gaziantep style kebab, with a big wooden oven churning out fresh lavash bread and lahmacun to order. Fumie had the classic ground meat Adana kebab, I had kanatler - simple grilled wings, crunchy and perfectly finished by one of those moustached meat masters of southern Turkey. The night before we left we returned for another Antep specialty that I have been wanting to try for years: katmer.

Katmer is a thin, flakey baklava pastry folded around a pistachio and vanilla cream filling, served hot from the oven. I don't usually eat sweets but there is a first time for everything and this was our final stop before returning to Budapest. We also found a local festival of regional foods near the Marmaray train staion: producers from all over Turkey were handing out samples and selling both fresh traditinal and cooked foods. We stopped and shared a cağ kebab - a specialty of Erzurum in Eastern Turkey, the horizontal ancestor of the modern vertical spit döner. 

The meat, she sings!

Turkey is home to several million refugees of the Syrian civil wars. A large Syrian neighborhood coalesced in the conservative Muslim neighborhood west of Aksaray station in Fatih district. We went there one very hot Saturday day to visit the huge Findikzade market. 

Down the block was something I was curious about: real Syrian falafel. Falafel isn't a Turkish dish, and until the Syrians arrived it was virtually unknown. Most of us know falafel from its Israeli version, translated through trendy vegan recipes and commodified as a fast food. The falafel I had at Tayba Falafel next to Haseki tram station was an eye opener. 

Syrian falaful in Fatih

It was lighter, crunchier, lighter and less heavily spiced than most snack stand falafels I have eaten. The Syrian Hummus was creamy smooth with whole chickpeas sitting on top, the taboon bread was hot and fresh. It was wonderful, just the thing for a hot day. Fumie went for the lahmacun, which was spiced with mint and served inside a wrap of flat taboon bread, sort of a bread on bread sandwich, but stıll good. 

At Yesilköy beach. The 1877 treaty that ended the Russo-turkish war was signed here!

People may ask me if Turkey ıs still worth visiting and my answer ıs a wholehearted yes. Yes, it has social and economic upheavals due to a megalomaniac Leader figure - but then again, I live in Hungary and just visited the USA, so I am familiar with that form of social misery already. But careful planning can keep your budget intact, and nobody should pass up the chance to experience the openness and overwhelming grace and friendliness of the Turkish people. You don't return to Turkey for the food, or the rugs, or the beaches. You go for the people.

New York New Jersey New World

We're heading home. It's been a relatively short trip back to the family homestead in New Jersey, a full four miles outside of New York City, just a Spanish bus ride down Route 4 away. We didn't go into the city very much this time. The main purpose was to be here for my Dad's 99th birthday.

Jack Cohen, US Navy veteran and retired Gold Shield New York City Police department detective is still sharp and fully operating at 100%. He is a bit shaky walking long distances and his career as a dancer of 1950s mambo and chacha are definitely over, but he still gets out to the Jersey meadowlands almost daily to go bird watching, which is a unique hobby for a former NYPD detective. He doesn't mess with the finches and sparrows much. He watches eagles and Ospreys, the big birds.

There are two things I miss about New York that I can't find in Europe: decent Cantonese Chinese food and Jewish style pastrami. Most of the "authentic Chinese" food we get in Hungary is straight out Beijing: dumplings, dumplings, and dumplings. For pastrami I have actually made it myself, which is messy and a ridiculous effort. Other than that Manhattan has changed so much since 9/11 that I don't have much use for it anymore. Gone are the quirky bookshops, the record stores, the oddball ethnic percussion shops, replaced by chain department stores selling sneakers to teenagers and Gucci to the luxury class.

Hand cut meats at Pastrami Bistro Grill

For Jewish deli food, there are fewer and fewer real Jewish delis left. Liebman's in the Bronx, Pastrami Queen, and notable Pastrami master Freddie Loesser of the legendary and excellent (and closed) Loesser's Deli in the Bronx just passed away this month. Katz's Deli, which I have written about many times, has become a major New York tourist destination, with long waiting lines (people say to go late at night if you don't like lines) The pastrami sandwich at Katz's is now $32.00, which sounds like a lot but it is the best in the world (alongside Schwartz' Smoked Meat in Montreal) and 32 bucks generally won't get you far in New York anyways. We opted to stay in Jersey, and went to the Pastrami Grill Bistro in Garfield.

Brisket Sandwich, Garfield, NJ

Where I am a hardboiled pastrami guy, Fumie loves beef with a pure beefy flavor, so she ordered the brisket sandwich. It was fourteen dollars. Less than half the New York price these days. It was fantastic. Same texture and consistency as the corned beef and pastrami but without the spicing. I may become a fan of brisket sandwiches in the future. They are certainly easier to make in home recipe version than pastrami, although finding the right cut of beef in Hungary is going to require negotiation with a butcher. Butcher cuts in Hungary are entirely different from those in the USA.

Classic $8 Wonton Noodle at 218 Grand street.

I have nothing against taking the 7 train all the way to Flushing for New York's widest selection of regional Chinese food, but for Cantonese food Manhattan's Chinatown still rules. In my younger days I used to underwrite trips to the city by economizing on food: I ate almost exclusively Hong Kong style wonton noodle soups, which used to be the cheap option for a meat and soup dinner under five dollars. Today that has doubled. A lot of the cheap noodle soup and congee places that used to sell chopped Cantonese BBQ meats have disappeared along with the sweatshop clothing industry that supported them until recently. 

Giant wonton and noodle in duck soup with beef tendon at Maxi's.

In their place a new generation of wonton noodle soup houses have opened up. I had read about Maxi's Noodle, which specializes in the old Hong Kong style noodle soups. They used to be one of the only Cantonese places in Flushing. The daughter of the original owner took it over and made a hip atmosphere and preserved the family tradition of making some of the largest shrimp and meat wontons in the city. I had to go. Fantastic, and worth the price.

Grandmas Rulez at Mott Street Food Court

Chinatown used to be the home of massive dim sum parlors, many of which, like the legendary Jing Fong, reputed to have had New York's largest single dining room, have closed down due to greedy lanlords and real estate managers. The newly opened Mott street Food Court, however, seems to have plugged the hold. There were no tourists to be seen, instead the tables were filled by seemingly vagrant Chinese Grandmothers shouting across the room in Cantonese. Perfect. Jackpot!

Rice rolls, shiu mai, turnip cake, tofu skin rolls.

This isn't a classic Dim Sum spot: there are no servers pushing carts piled with bamboo steamers around the food (you can still find that in Queens.) There are several stalls selling everything from bubble tea to Taiwanese beef noodle soup, but we chose to order Dim Sum, which came in plastic trays. 

Teochew dumplings

About a quarter of the old Chinatown population comes from Teochew, a region in eastern Canton bordering Vietnam that speaks its own form of Min Chinese (instead of the Cantonese Yue language of Guangdong) and became to source for the majority of Chinese emigrants to southeast Asia. Teochew food shares a lot of flavors and techniques with Vietnamese and SE Asian food, and we usually have a go at Bo Ky, which is still one of the most affordable joints in New York. Here on Mott Street they had Teochew dumplings: wrapped in a soft gooey rice and mugwort coat and containing a mix of mystery meat, peanuts, and scallions. 

We came back for the Teochew dumplings with my son Aron and Chi, who had already eaten when we met them so they missed out. Perhaps because the night before Aron had gone with us to Fort Lee, NJ, for shanghai style food at Soup Dumplings Plus, one of the few Chinese restaurants in the overwhelmingly Korean part of Bergen County next to the George Washington Bridge.

The Soup dumplings were excellent, and that says a lot since I was never sold on the soup dumpling craze. We finished our trip with a family tradition - the mamaliga and seafood feast. My Dad's family came from Moldavia, and while growing up poor in New York in the great depression during the 1930s, my Grandmother would rely on that old Romanian staple, mamaliga, (which is essentially cornmeal mush, or more elegantly, polenta) to feed her four children. 

The Cohens: Fran, Jerrie, Jack in baseball cap, Grandma, Eli around 1938

Dad still craves mamaliga, and I make it for him when I am around, especially as a side dish to shrimp creole. Dad has to watch his sodium and potassium these days, so okra subs for tomatoes and shrimp has enough flavor to not need salt. My Dad also introduced me to clams on the half shell when I was about twelve years old, possibly as a hedge against me becoming increasingly kosher as I entered the bar mitzvah study stage (clams, indeed, any shellfish, are not considered kosher.) I introduced my son to clams when he was around 9, and he has been sucking them down ever since as well. So here it is: three generations of Cohens, integrating the traditional with the modern. Seafood and mamaliga!