Dear Culinary Backstreets, My husband and I are planning a visit to Istanbul with two little ones in tow. We love to be adventurous with food and want to explore the city’s culinary scene, but are also a bit concerned about finding “child-friendly” places to eat. Do you have any recommendations?

Editor’s note: This post wraps up our special series this week featuring our top street food picks in all of the Culinary Backstreets cities. As rapidly as Istanbul marches toward its modern destiny, street food in this city is still served the old-fashioned way, by boisterous ustas with a good pitch and, sometimes, a really good product.

Editor’s note: While the fate of the Gezi Park occupation is being hotly discussed, we’ve been spending our time sipping deeper into Turkey’s other great debate: what is the country’s national drink? In the spirit of national reconciliation, here is our report. The recent protests that raged across Turkey may have been sparked by the government’s ham-fisted efforts to bulldoze a precious stand of trees in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, but the country’s eaters and drinkers had already gotten a taste of Ankara’s increasingly meddlesome overreach during the weeks and months before.