Few would
disagree that Ciya Sofrasi is one of the most celebrated restaurants in Turkey,
especially in international food circles. Most recently, the restaurant and its
chef, Musa Dagdeviren, were covered very favorably in The New Yorker and the Financial
Times. The restaurant is located in Kadikoy district in Istanbul and one needs
to take a 20 minute ferry ride from Eminonu, in Old City, to get there.
Chef
Dagdeviren travels around the country researching regional peasant home cooking
and recreating some of those dishes in his restaurant. He’s also a regular
attendee to many Culinary Institute of America (CIA) events in the States,
highlighting Turkish and Anatolian cuisine. With his wife, Zeynep, they publish
a quarterly magazine called Food and Culture which includes essays regarding
the history and culture about the region’s rich and less documented cuisine. In
each issue, chef Dagdeviren brings to life seven unforgotten dishes from the
region by providing their recipes in the magazine.
If you think that kebap is simply ground and grilled meat on
a skewer and that you can have it in Turkish restaurants in New
York or Paris,
then you are only partially correct. While it is true that kebap is grilled on
a skewer, it is not ground. An authentic kebap is always hand cut with a
special knife which is called zirh, and it is quite an art form, not unlike
sushi, to master the trade. The meat cut with this sharp knife remains quite
juicy and does not taste like a burger when grilled. I have never seen a
Turkish or Middle Eastern restaurant outside Turkey which actually cares to
prepare authentic kebap.
One of the delights of being in Istanbul in Spring is the chance of eating
what, IMO, is the most flavorful turbot (called kalkan in Turkish) on earth.
Turbot is a fish that I order often in France,
Spain (rodaballo) and Italy (rombo), and I find the turbot from the Atlantic in general superior to the Mediterranean
variety, but not quite on par with a Black Sea Turbot caught in the Marmara
sea. Indeed the dense and meaty turbot from the cold waters of Brittany is quite similar in taste to the Black Sea turbot
that is highly prized in Istanbul
in Spring.Unfortunately the increasing
popularity and astronomical prices of this noble fish have led to its
widespread farming, and fish markets in Istanbul
are now filled with turbot farmed in the Balkans, especially Bulgaria.
Although it is still a tasty fish, farmed turbot, which is brownish in color,
is quite bland compared to the wild version.
