Çukur Meyhane

Çukur Meyhane, a small, slightly shabby basement meyhane in Beyoğlu’s Galatasaray area, certainly does not look like the kind of place with any shining stars on the menu. On one of our very first visits, the floor seemed to be covered in a mixture of sawdust, table scraps and some cigarette ash. The tiny open kitchen occupies one corner, while the VIP table – where a group of old-timers can be found watching horse races on TV, scratching at racing forms, cursing and cheering – takes up a slightly larger area. A good bit of the other half of the room is home to a giant ornamental wooden beer barrel.

Hail Caesar's

Editor's note: We're celebrating Mushroom Week at Culinary Backstreets, and today's installment takes us to Istanbul's Belgrade Forest, where Turkey's leading wild mushroom expert has found some remarkable fungus specimens. “This would be front-page news in France!” Jilber raved, darting off between tall chestnut trees and oaks, obscured by a hazy steam that seemed to hang in the forest like a gauzy Halloween decoration. He looked over each shoulder and all around him where it seemed he was surrounded by golf balls, shanked off and forgotten in the rough.

Big-Time Baklava

Editor’s note: To celebrate Ramazan Bayramı, also called Şeker Bayramı, the three-day holiday at the end of the holy month of Ramadan, we are republishing this 2014 article about our favorite spots for baklava – sweets are an integral part of the festivities, which began on May 13 this year. Turkey’s European Union membership bid may be stuck in the mud, but a different dynamic is at work on the food front. To wit: the European Commission has granted Gaziantep baklava a spot on its list of protected designations of origin and geographical indications. It’s the first Turkish product and the 16th non-EU food to make it on the list. In honor of this much-deserved recognition, we’ve put together our own list of favorite places to get baklava in Istanbul and Gaziantep.

Erzincan Tandır Ekmeği

In the Kurtuluş district of Istanbul, we’ve lately been exploring links to older, nearly lost Istanbul culinary traditions. Spending time in the sweetshops, milk bars and şarküteri of this district, we’ve seen a glimmer, if faded, of the “Old Istanbul” that people remember from the 1950s and '60s, when the city’s historic minorities – Greeks, Armenians and Jews – played a prominent role in the culinary scene of the city. It’s a complex and endlessly fascinating subject, one that never fails to spark our curiosity. And then we were distracted by the smell of fresh bread. Fresh lavaş, to be more specific, being hoisted out of a fiery hole in the floor on a blackened hook by the sturdy Gül Hanım.

Kenan Usta Ocakbaşı

If Istanbul had a city museum, in the 20th-century exhibition we’d expect to walk into a life-sized recreation of Kenan Usta Ocakbaşı, a seminal grill joint in the Beyoğlu district. As visitors descended a few steps into the exhibition, sensors would trigger the harsh light of fluorescent bulbs overhead, illuminating a room covered in photographs of husky men with mustaches posing with a stout man in an apron, grill master Kenan Usta. The somber, groaning warble of the great Arabesque singer Müslüm Gürses would cue up in the visitors’ rented headsets and ducts inside the replica grill would belch out smoke scented authentically by grilled meat.

İnciraltı

We like to think of İnciraltı, a laid-back meyhane in the sleepy Bosphorus-side Beylerbeyi neighborhood, as a destination restaurant – not so much because of the food, but because of the destination itself. Not that there’s anything wrong with the food here, which is reliably well made. The meze tray at İnciraltı (which means “under the fig tree” in Turkish) is brought to your table carrying all the classics, plus a few welcome and tasty surprises, such as the zingy brined twigs of the caper plant and a sea bass fillet that has been cured in a piquant sauce redolent of curry.

Sıdıka

It has been years now since we were first tipped to Sıdıka. The W Hotel had just opened in the splashy Akaretler rowhouse development. Vogue, the rooftop sushi lounge, was still in style. The Shangri-La hotel was under construction down on the waterfront, and it was rumored that some rooms would have Bosphorus views below sea level. Beşiktaş, long the bastion of cheap draft beer joints and university student flatshares, was having some growing pains.