Best Things to Eat In Istanbul!
Turkey has a very diverse and world-renowned cuisine and Istanbul is the place in which you can find all of them. Since Istanbul has many representatives from all the cultures, you will see and taste unique things in this metropolitan City. Even though you can witness international fast food chains, don’t even think about them and focus on traditional cuisine. Since there are many food types in this diverse city, it would be confusing to choose where to start. In this article, we will give brief information about the foods you have to taste in Istanbul while staying at the Sultanahmet Hotel, Sura Hotels.
Turkish Breakfast
If you compare the breakfast culture of Turkish people with the Europeans’, you will see they are no match for each other. First of all, Turkish people use tea in breakfast session and we have tomatoes or cucumbers as a must-have ingredient at breakfast. And we shouldn’t forget the bread since it is one of the main items of a Turkish breakfast. Even though the white bread is the traditional choice, in modern Turkey you can see many different types of bread too.
Moreover, we have cheese, old cheese, black and green olives, thick cream, butter, jam, honey, an omelet or boiled eggs. But when we think about the traditional breakfast, we should mention about the sucuklu yumurta and börek too. Sucuk or the sujuk, is a food that is basically a dried sausage made of ground beef with garlic and variety of spices like red pepper and etc. When the sujuk meets with the eggs in the pan, it becomes one of the most delicious things in the world, the sucuklu yumurta. Börek is made of thin sheets of dough and it can be filled with cheese, minced meat or potatoes too.
Moreover, there is a special food called gözleme and you must try this one too. About the places, you can have very good Turkish breakfast on the coastline of the Bosphorus or try Rumelihisarı and Bebek. Since there is strong competition in these areas, you cannot go wrong in that area.
Menemen
We didn’t want to add menemen to the Turkish breakfast since it is a whole different food. It is kind of an omelet cooked with Turkish ingredients and style. Inside of this, we use roasted onions and peppers and we fry tomatoes and finally mix all of them with eggs, herbs, parsley, pepper, and ground red pepper. It is cheap, delicious, easy to make and a favorite food for many Turks. There is an area called Menemen in the city of İzmir and this food gets its name from there. The first tomato which is the main ingredient of the menemen was grown in İzmir in the early 1920s and this gave the name to this delicious and addictive food. Sometimes they make it with the sujuk or old cheese too and you should try this one definitely.
Meze / Cold Starters
Meze is an essential food for many fish and kebap restaurants. In Turkey, there are restaurants called Meyhane and the ‘mey’ part gets its name from the meze expertise. In a meyhane, they traditionally serve mezes and alcoholic beverages. But apart from that, in many kebap and fish restaurants of Turkey, after you order your food, the will bring you different kinds of mezes free of charge. Among the most popular mezes, we can talk about these:
- Chili Tomato Paste (Ezme)
- Grilled Eggplants with Yogurt (Patlıcan Ezmesi)
- Grilled Eggplant Salad (Patlıcan Salatası)
- Fried Eggplant with Tomato Sauce (Şakşuka)
- Mint Yogurt Dip (Haydari)
- Pinto Beans (Barbunya)
- Artichoke (Zeytinyağlı Enginar)
You can visit Kumkapı, Asmalımescit, Ahırkapı, and Beyoğlu for best mezes.
