Basta Street Food Bar

Dürüm is the specialty at Basta Street Food Bar, but you won’t find a smoky grill inside this tiny Kadıköy storefront. With its bright turquoise counter, tile-patterned floor, and steel-topped, light-wood stools, Basta looks more like a hip café than a traditional kebab joint. “One customer came in, sat at the counter, took one look at what we were doing in the kitchen and walked right out,” laughs Kaan Sakarya. The former chef of the highly rated Nicole restaurant in Istanbul, Sakarya opened Basta in April along with colleague Derin Arıbaş. Their aim: applying their fine-dining training to gourmet fast food – specifically dürüm, grilled meat wrapped up inside lavaş flatbread.

Farewell Lokanta Maya

When Didem Şenol decided to open her first restaurant on an out-of-the-way street in the then-sleepy Karaköy neighborhood of Istanbul, the young chef’s friends thought she was making a huge mistake. “They said, ‘Are you crazy? There’s nothing there, no one will go there.’ But Karaköy was close to my home in Galata, and I enjoyed the historic feeling of all the old buildings there,” Şenol reminisced last month over coffee at her deli/café Gram in Şişhane, another formerly sleepy Istanbul neighborhood. “I thought if we made good food, people would hear about it and come.” Her gamble paid off.

Farming on the Edge

“We grow everything here – kale, dill, peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, arugula, eggplant, lettuce, cauliflower… everything,” the elderly woman says proudly, waving her hand in the direction of her small field as she digs her worn plastic sandals into the dirt. While she grows the vegetables and herbs, her 80-year-old husband tends his pomegranate trees and takes their products from this patch of farmland at the far northern end of Istanbul’s Sarıyer district to sell at local markets around the city.