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!

Voltaire Had it Right: Tend your Garden!

"I also know", said Candide, "that we must cultivate our garden."
"You are right," said Pangloss, "for when man was put in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, to work; which proves that man was not born to rest."
"Let us work without reasoning," said Martin, "it is the only way to make life endurable."

NagyDiofa  Community Garden today

Voltaire had it right when he wrote Candide. You can fill your head with all manner of nonsense and trivia, but the best way to settle down and feel... normal?... is to cultivate your garden. That is very sound advice in the world we live in today, crowded as it is with competing outrage, threats, and tragedy. Our little green world is a plot of community garden land sitting just below our upstairs window. About 45 plots are held by  diverse set of local residents, and about four years ago we got lucky and took over an abandoned parcel. At first it looked like a bit of dry dust, but over the years that has been fixed with lots of organic compost. And egg shells. And Fumie's labor. The garden is mostly her baby. She can work on it for hours, planning and scheming compost strategies and planting schedules like a General planning an invasion offensive. 

Breaking ground 

We live in an old building surrounding a courtyard in what was once - and to a large extent, still is - the Budapest Jewish Ghetto. Not exactly a green country paradise. In fact, our address is a listed "Yellow Star House" - during the holocaust Jews in Budapest were forced out of homes outside of the official ghettos and restricted to living in Yellow Star houses. The building itself is not exactly conducive to agricultural pursuits. It gets little sun, and is increasingly turning into a rabbit hutch of cheap Air B&Bs housing large groups of loud, drunken British stag parties on weekends.

There are only about four or five flats left in our building that are still home to actual residents. One way to let the tourists know that your part of the gangway is not a part of the communal lobby is to hang plants from the railing. Fumie excels in balcony botany. she has a selection of flowers along with peppers, herbs, and even a giant cabbage plant which was threatening to turn into a cabbage tree.

These old buildings were all built around a central courtyard. Klauzal ter, where we are located, is still in the center of the old Jewish community of downtown Pest. Before WWII there were a lot of Jewish tailors in the neighborhood, and they competed for status by trying to outdo each other for the largest flats. A single apartment could be over ten rooms and take up half a floor of the building. Since few needed so much space, they subdivided the flats into smaller apartments, usually accessible to a shared bathroom at the end of the gangway outside. After the Holocaust, bustling Klauzal ter became an undeveloped backwater neighborhood, and the flats were separated into individual state owned apartments, with many going to rural Gypsy families who found employment in the post-war period revival of bombed out Budapest, mainly removing rubble from the streets and construction labor. When I was a kid I remembered seeing these piles of rocks and bomb rubble on street corners all along the boulevards of Pest. One of the last rubble piles was in the space where the garden is located today. 

Treviso lettuce 

Most of the soil here was trucked in, so with the addition of compost - which the garden produces in several huge bins along the walls - the soil is pretty healthy. We have been eating salads from our own lettuce and ruccola since march.  We have been using it to produce vegetables we couldn't normally find in Hungary - things like okra, ruccola, and Italian eggplants. 

We are flying to the USA tomorrow, so for the next month we have friends who will look after our plants and water the garden, but I definitely do not think I will be able to find any tomatoes or cukes that can match what we grow. Nor will we be able to enjoy a nice strudel at the corner pastry shop in the afternoon after a day in the garden. But... there will be clams... and pizza. And more surprises.

Romanian Stuffed Cabbage: The Sarmale Awards

Sarmale at Varzarie, Cluj

We just returned from a quick trip south to Transylvania, where, I am happy to admit, I ate stuffed cabbage - sarmale in Romanian - every day. Stuffed cabbage is the soul food of East Europe, the apex cuisine of everything east of Austria. Every nook and corner of the Balkans and Carpathians has its own unique, localized version, little logs of meat or veg mixed with grains and rolled inside a cabbage leaf, stewed, and served by a doting grandma in a flowery head kerchief. All are praised as the epitome of local cuisine, proudly stated as the "national dish." Go to Poland: try our Gołąbki. Visiting Hungary? Tőltőtt Káposzta! Serbia - sarma! But after spending decades eating around southeast Europe, the award for best stuffed cabbage goes to... may I have the envelope, please... Romania! 

Rodica Tuli's summer sarmale in Mociu, Transylvania

Sarmale is the go-to food for nearly every family gathering or dinner event in Romania, at least if it held indoors and doesn't involve an animal roasting on a spit. Families usually have a home made batch frozen and ready to serve for whenever visitors drop in. Romanians take their stuffed cabbage seriously. There are lots of local variants. Sarmale usually consist of a stuffing of meat and rice wrapped with a whole cabbage leaf, but then the taxonomy begins to branch out. Vegetarian sarmale are made for Orthodox lent and fast days, called "sarmale de post" which swap out the meat for combinations of mushrooms and carrots. The cabbage leaf can be either fresh - and soured with either vinegar or borș, a sour soup stock made from wheat bran (easily purchased in powder form from any supermarket.) 

Rodica's winter sarmale with smoked pork

The souring agent is the thing that sets most Romanian and Hungarian stuffed cabbage apart from the so-called "cabbage rolls" you can get at ethnic church dinners in the USA, which are usually made with fresh cabbage leaf. You need to have whole heads of cabbage given the sauerkraut treatment in big buckets. When I still lived in the USA I used to make my own using 20 gallon plastic cement buckets. As directed by my Macedonian buddy Emil's Mom, you have to cut out the bottom core of the cabbage, fill it full of coarse salt and let it sit overnight before immersing the heads in a bucket of salted water, where they will sit for about a month to ripen and become sauerkraut. Meanwhile, Macedonian friends would stop by to ask for bottles of the pickling juice - nearly everybody in the Balkans swears by sauerkraut juice as the most effective cure for hangovers, usually backed up by gravely pseudoscientific theories involving ions and magnetic fields.

Sarmale and stuffed peppers in perfect harmony

Next, depending on your religious beliefs, you prepare the stuffing, which will ecumenically include pre-soaked rice. Then you roll them up, something you need to spend years learning from your Balkan grandma and practicing on a weekly basis until adulthood. You place the sarmale inside a huge pot separated by layers of sauerkraut and - if not following a religious fast - chunks of smoked pig you would have hanging in your pantry from an innocent porker you dispatched in your back yard a few months ago. If you are Jewish, smoked goose will do just fine if you can find a smoked goose leg. I can easily obtain this ridiculously overpriced ingredient, but then I live in the last real Jewish neighborhood in East Europe. Cover with broth and stew for about two hours. Serve with a bowl of sour cream, preferably made from water buffalo milk.

Don't forget the smoked pork!

Hungarians tend to roll their cabbages rather big, and also use more meat in relation to the rice in the stuffing. Romanian sarmale are smaller - two-bite wonders that you can really pile on your plate. Prodigiuos eaters of sarmale are noted in family histories. The great Gypsy fiddler Bela Kodoba from Palatca was famous for his record of eating 38 sarmale in one sitting, an accomplishment still mentioned in his village two decades after his passing. Gypsies in Transylvania also make a form of sarmale with corn meal stuffing - sarmale de păsat - which inspired a dance tune that came to be played at virtually all Gypsy weddings.

Dobruja style stuffed grape leaves

Like a lot of classic Balkan cooking, sarmale have origins in the Ottoman Empire, at least linguistically. Turks prepare lahana dolma from cabbage as well as from the better known grape leaves. I once had stuffed grape leaf sarmale in Maramureș cooked by a woman whose husband was from the Dobruja region along the Black Sea, an area of pronounced Turkish influence. These were made with beef, making them halal for  Muslim consumption, although I am pretty sure there are no Muslims in Maramureș. 

Sarmale with mamaliga at the Varzarie in Cluj

You can get sarmale in nearly any Romanian restaurant, but if you ever visit Cluj - the central city of Transylvania - make a point to visit the Varzarie at Bulevardul Eroililor 35-37, in downtown Cluj. In business since the 1960s, the Varzarie (translates out to something like the "cabbagerie") specializes in stuffed cabbage and in varză de Cluj, a deconstructed dish consisting of the parts of a stuffed cabbage formed into a loaf. That's a pretty unappetizing description but believe me, you will want more. 

Look Ma, no paprika! 

If you are in Hungary stuffed cabbage is less of a restaurant dish than a home style Sunday lunch. Due to arcane Hungarian health laws, food has to be sold on the same day that it is prepared, making it difficult for restaurants to prepare labor intensive dishes like stuffed cabbage that are usually made in large quantities and left overnight to mature before serving the next day. Hungarian stuffed cabbage also tends to be seasoned with lots of paprika, and sometimes tomato sauce, something you don't often see in Transylvania. If you can't find tőltőtt káposzta on the menu, you probably can find székely káposzta, which is pork stewed in sauerkraut, something of a deconstructed stuffed cabbage but still a pretty good runner up for the flavor profile. 

 székely káposzta

You can usually find tőltőtt káposzta in Budapest at proletarian lunch counters called étkezde or classic Magyar eateries like the Pozsonyi Kisvendéglő, and I believe the Pleh Csarda out on Kolozsvar utca serves them, although why would you go all the way out there if not to order the gigantic fried pork cutlet? The surest guarantee to eat tőltőtt káposzta is to stay late at a Hungarian wedding: usually after midnight the late night meal gets wheeled out which is usually a Volkswagen sized food cart full of stuffed cabbage. 

Romanians are so invested in sarmale that there is now Sarmale Delivery stuffed cabbage in Cluj - suggested for events such as weddings, birthdays and funerals!  Not only that, there is a facebook group dedicated to sarmale. One friend in Cluj tells me that there is a European wide network of Romanian home cooks that will deliver sarmale to Romanian truck drivers stuck on the highways of Western Europe on weekends without sarmale. No Transylvanian can imagine life without a plate of sarmale. I certainly can't. 

Kadiköy: Asian Istanbul

We've been to Istanbul many times so the famous tourist spots have little to offer us. Erdogan's love-hate relationship with the economics of tourism provided the backdrop to a steep rise in entry fees to museums and historical sites. The Agha Sofia Mosque - an absolute must see - now charges over EURO 25, and non-Turks are allowed only through a special entrance to one of the balcony areas - where some of the magnificent Byzantine images by are hidden by curtains. The Kariye /Chora Museum now charges EURO 20, the Galata Tower charges EURO 30. But we didn't come to Istanbul for the Museums this time. We came for the food, and a lot of the best is found in residential zones outside of the tourist districts.

Kadiköy Market

Kadiköy is on the Asian side of the Bosporus straits, and visitors usually reach it by ferry from Eminönu station across the water. With the newly opened Marmaray train service you can now get there directly by taking a modern subway underneath the Bosporus - a feat of engineering that counts as one of the modern world's technological marvels at least until the next big earthquake hits the Aegean fault, which runs directly beneath it. But, as they say in Turkey.. Mashallah... if God wills it. For the moment, God willed us to get to Kadiköy cheaply and quickly, so He held back on the quakes for the afternoon. We booked into the aptly named Duck Hotel in the fashionable Moda district of Kadiköy. After the spacious five star Ramada in Bakirköy the Duck was a bit downscale (read: cheap) and cramped, but we did have a roof terrace. Lesson learned: never choose accommodations based simply on animal names! 

Kadiköy is the nightlife and market district for the Asian side of Istanbul, and has been since it was known to the ancient Greek s as Chalcedon. Compared to the working class congestion of the European side, the Anatolian bit of Istanbul is definitely upwardly mobile. Leading to the southern suburbs of Moda and Maltepe along the coast are fashionable boulevards lined with designer shops and trendy hamburger joints. Go north and you hit Usküdar, a conservative Muslim neighborhood with prime kebab grills. Continue north and the Bosporus is lined with affluent garden suburbs housing Istanbul's techno-and-media glitterati. And when these folks want to go pub hopping, they take the ferry to Kadiköy. 

One advantage of our location was we were on the quaint T2 historical tram line, which runs in a circle around hilly Moda center. Another was the burek shop across the street. Cheap lodgings meant no fancy breakfast, which was fine as long as I had access to fresh meat and cheese pastries at 7 am. You find all kinds of filling: minced meat, cheese, spinach, or potato. I tend to choose su böregi "wet burek", basically a white lasagna. Kadiköy is famous for its open market, one of the largest in Istanbul, but it is equally a center for antique hunting, second hand and vintage shops, and tons of eateries which serve the crowds on weekends and evenings. We had already been to the rightly famed Çiya for regional Turkish specialties, so we tried a few new spots. first off: Fumie needs seafood. 

Midye dolma - rice stuffed mussels - are a specifically Istanbul street snack. Most Turks think they are  disgusting, and when a newcomer arrives into Istanbul from the Anatolian hinterlands his friends take him out and force him to try mussels as a rıte of passage. They are stuffed with a mild rice pilaf and usually affordable at around thirty cents a piece. We went big: all you can eat, the price being figured afterwards by counting the shells and dividing by half. 

But the evening was young and I was still hungry. Instead of heading to our original destination - Çiya - we wound up at Tatar Salim Döner kebab, allegedly the best in Kadiköy. Döner kebab is everywhere in Turkey, all of them much, much better than anything you can imagine in your home cities where they serve to soak up drunken binges and wind up painting the asphalt after a night of partying. Most döner  are the pre-made gigantic hunk of meat ordered from a central factory for kebab making, but if you search there are still old-fashioned döner masters who layers thin slices of lamb or beef on a skewer in the old traditional method. 

Such is Tatar Salim, which only serves the house special döner - either with or without rice, with a fresh, flatbread lavas, salad and French fries. These guys take their spit roasted meat very seriously, and it shows. This was one of the most memorable meat dishes of my life - while Fumie was in rapture over the simple pilaf (made from bardo rice) served underneath it, leaving half of her meat for me to inhale.

We were in Turkey during the hamşi season, which we missed last visit. Hamşi are Black Sea anchovies, and they are everywhere during the cold months. Black Sea cuisine is dependent on these tiny fish for a huge variety of dishes - from hamşi pilaf to hamşi bread to hamşi stews. We had taken the ferry across the water to visit the Beşiktaş market one day and found ourselves right outside the fish market. There was no escaping it. 

Hamşi tava - fried anchovies. Simply served with a squirt of lemon and a loaf of fresh bread. Don't worry about the bones - they won't bother you. Black Sea culture is obsessed with hamşi - folk dances mimic the movements of the shoals of fish, and it seems that every third or fourth song is about their favorite fish. If you ever visit Trabzon, Rize, Ordu or Samsun, try to get there for the opening of hamşi season. it is kind of like Cajun Mardi Gras, but with three string kemençe fiddles and more fish.

We were in Beşiktaş just as the local football team was about to play a match, The streets were crowded with hardcore Beşiktaş fans of all ages dressed in the black and white colors of their team, selling scarves and ribbons and getting ready for the evening game by spending the afternoon drinking beer and eating hamsi. Teenage Gypsy bands played Beşiktaş Team anthems on street corners. Fifteen years ago we went to a Beşiktaş game - when Turkish fans are happy, or even when they were not, they liked to shoot live pistol ammunition into the air which went straight up skyward, and then - unfortunately - down atop the hill above the stadium in the trendy Taksim neighborhood. People used to stay indoors and hide after games to avoid falling ammunition.

We didn't witness any such bad behavior, in fact, the crowds were the best behaved footie fans we have ever seen in Europe. But the crowds were growing and we escaped up the hill to the weekly Beşiktaş market. A huge concrete building - somebody's idea of a parking garage yard sale gone wild - was filled with stands offering vegetables, kitchen wares, fish, and dodgy blue jeans.

A woman was selling dried herbs whose smell attracted us from far across the concrete. We bought some Mediterranean wild thyme - kekik - which is somewhere between thyme and oregano, and a bag of dried spearmint - nana. We also got a bottle of nar ekisi - pomegranate molasses. Since getting home we have been making our salads Turkish style with a sprinkling of mint and a squirt of pomegranate, which lends a more sour taste with a bit of sweetness. Of all the things you can take home from Turkey, we always end up with a suitcase full of flavor.

The Rug.

Then Fumie spotted a rug. The Rug. Her eyes filled with textile love the likes of which I had never seen. Not an antique or some collectors item, but a recently made Afghanistan kilim rug for everyday use. Asking about it consisted of spending about fifteen minutes speaking in weak Turkish while fucking up the number system and writing things down on cell phones, and in the process the rug went from about $250 down to $100, which was its actual price because I heard a local woman ask about it and understood their Turkish enough to hear it priced as about $100. And then we walked away. Quandary #1: How were we going to get it home? The last time we bought a rug I hauled it on my back via trains, buses, and ferries overland to Budapest. Quandary #2: We still want it. Quandary #3: Similar Rugs are available at any normal market in Istanbul on any day of the week. They are waiting for us. And we will be back.

Kadiköy seaside at Moda