About Me

ABOUT ME. VEDAT MILOR

Since early childhood I have taken for granted the abundance and availability of good food on an everyday basis. This was a time when good quality fish, meat and seafood was available for very reasonable prices and before the World Bank (where I have worked in the early 90s) had started to corrupt Turkish agriculture to suit the interests of multinational agro-business. I was also lucky that I grew up with my paternal grandparents. My grandmother, from Konya, was a serious home cook.

Upon coming to the US for graduate studies I was awed and distressed by two things. First, as I unscientifically observed, Americans ate more industrial chicken than anybody else on earth. Second, and especially in my International House dormitory at Berkeley, in California, getting decent, let alone good food, was as difficult as finding the needle in the haystack.

It is at this point that Chez Panisse came to the rescue and was an eye opener for me in the sense that I had never thought that one could eat great food in restaurants (even to this day, the best of the Turkish cuisine can only be experienced in households). About the same time, I have also discovered the taste of decent Southern Rhone wines that I could afford at Kermit Lynch and I realized the true meaning of a cliché, that the sum is greater than the constituent parts when wine is carefully matched with food.

Next came a half year fellowship in France intended for the study of French Economic Planning, but in practice resulted in the study of dining out at the Michelin starred restaurants, including 30 or so meals at the best restaurant of the time, Robuchon’s Jamin when there still was a 140 FF lunch menu which was equivalent to about $15 given the exchange rate in 85/86. The rest is, well… history. Once bitten by the lure of exquisite eating and nostalgia for my country and my childhood I developed a fascination, one can also call obsession, with good food. To this day, I am crazy enough to drive to the middle of nowhere in rural Spain or Italy in search of 20 day old lamb from the Churra breed, or “culatello di zibello”, or “gamberi di San Remo” or “gambas Denia”, or……

I am also a regular food and wine reviewer/columnist for the prestigious Turkish newspaper Milliyet. My reviews appear on Sundays in the Weekend section and on Tuesdays in the Café section of Milliyet.

You can contact me at vmilorster@gmail.com