A waiter arrives at your table in Istanbul carrying a large tray, sets it down at chest height, and waits. On it are perhaps eighteen small white dishes. He has not said anything, because there is nothing to say: this is the menu, and you point at the ones you want.
If you have never met this before, the instinct is to point at two things and apologise. That is not the shape of the meal.
The meal has a rhythm, and it runs cold to hot
A full Turkish table moves through three stages:
- Soğuk meze — cold meze, mostly olive-oil based. Yoghurt with garlic, aubergine purées, bean salads, stuffed vine leaves, marinated fish.
- Ara sıcak — the hot middle. Börek, fried liver, grilled halloumi-style cheese, prawns in a small pan.
- Izgara / kebap — the grill, and usually the only thing that arrives on large plates.
You are not obliged to complete the set. Two people ordering four cold meze, one hot starter and one grill to share is a completely conventional order, and it is more food than it sounds.
Bread arrives without being ordered, keeps arriving, and is not a course.
Imam bayıldı is not a fainting imam
Machine translation renders imam bayıldı as "the imam fainted." It is aubergine stuffed with onion, garlic and tomato, cooked slowly in a great deal of olive oil and served at room temperature.
The translation is correct and useless, but it hides something genuinely worth knowing. Imam bayıldı belongs to the zeytinyağlılar — the olive-oil dishes — a whole category of vegetables cooked in oil and served cold, which exists in its own right rather than as a concession to anyone. Stuffed vine leaves, green beans in tomato, artichokes, leeks in olive oil: all of them are vegetables, oil, and no dairy or meat by construction.
Its near-twin, karnıyarık, looks almost identical on the plate, is served hot, and contains minced lamb. The two sit next to each other on many menus. If you eat no meat, that is the pair to be able to tell apart — and it is exactly the sort of thing worth knowing before the plate arrives, which is what our dietary guide is about.
The fat in the kebab
Adana kebab is minced lamb pressed onto a flat skewer, and the mince traditionally includes kuyruk yağı — lamb tail fat. That fat is not a shortcut; it is what makes the kebab taste the way it does, and it is why a lean version is a disappointment. It is also on no menu.
The other thing worth knowing about that skewer: Adana is the chilli-spiked one and Urfa is the same kebab without the chilli. If you want the flavour and not the heat, you do not need to negotiate — you order Urfa.
Two useful words either way: acılı means with chilli, acısız means without.
The stock nobody mentions
Mercimek çorbası, red lentil soup, is the default gentle thing on every menu in the country. It is frequently made with chicken or meat stock — tavuk suyu or et suyu — and the same is true of a lot of pilav, which is often finished with butter as well.
This is the standard shape of the problem: the dish is made of vegetables and the seasoning is not. Italian kitchens do the identical thing with meat brodo in risotto, as vegetarian at an Italian restaurant sets out, and there is more on the general case in hidden ingredients.
The easiest place to eat is the one with no menu
An esnaf lokantası is a tradesman's restaurant: a glass counter with fifteen trays of food already cooked, a queue, and no reading required. You point at two things and a portion of rice, you sit down, and you are eating in ninety seconds.
For a traveller with no Turkish, this is a far better experience than a laminated tourist menu with photographs — and the food is what the neighbourhood actually eats at lunchtime. Our guide for travellers makes the same argument about several other countries.
A small note on kebap
Kebap does not mean "meat on a stick." It covers oven-cooked and pot-cooked dishes too — Iskender is sliced döner over bread with tomato sauce and yoghurt, testi kebabı is stewed in a sealed clay pot and broken open at the table. If you have decided you do not like kebabs, you have probably only met one of them.
Where TableSage fits
TableSage reads a photographed menu and works out what a dish actually is rather than what its name literally says, flagging the stock, the butter and the lamb fat that never get written down. More on that in scan any menu.
It never calls a dish safe. Recipes vary between kitchens and change without notice, so the staff have the final word — but you will know what to ask.
