The kitchen of Istanbul is celebrated on the world stage for its cosmopolitan fusion of Ottoman, Greek, Armenian and Anatolian cuisines. But once the meze has been cleared from the table, it’s clear that the city’s food scene has historically been a dude chef’s club.
Today, however, a generation of female chefs are imagining — and reimagining — Istanbul’s sophisticated palate.
At Seraf Vadi, a restaurant in the Vadi neighborhood, chef Sinem Özler serves a refined take on classics like içli köfte, a Turkish version of the Levantine dish kibbeh.
Over in the Beyoglu district, Hodan, a buzzy fine-dining spot helmed by rising culinary star Cigdem Seferoglu, is as known for its plates of pomegranate and cucumber salads topped with tart sour cherry sorbet as its indoor-outdoor decor featuring origami chandeliers and a tree rising from the floor.
The Bebek Hotel, a cozy stay in the stylish Bebek enclave, opened the Japanese-modern restaurant Sankai by Nagaya last March, and was awarded a Michelin star eight months later, thanks to edomae sushi master Hiroko Shibata, who uses catches from local Turkish waters to meticulously prepare crab-and-shrimp doughnuts frosted with Black Sea trout roe and sashimi courses featuring pearly flakes of sea bass from the Marmara Sea.
The new spotlight on female chefs is a break from the country’s culinary traditions. “Men ran professional kitchens, women were expected to cook at home for their families,” Refika Birgul, an Istanbul-based cookbook star with 1.6 million followers on Instagram, recently told The New York Times. “But with the rise of modern fine dining culture in Istanbul, that dynamic is finally changing.”
The question of who gets to be a country's cusine gatekeeper is central to one of PRIOR’s favorite reads of last year, National Dish, by the food writer and author Anya von Bremzen. “Until the 1650s there wasn’t anything remotely like distinct, codified ‘national’ cooking, anywhere,” von Bremzen writes in her exploration of the backstories behind iconic meals around the world, from Japanese curry to Italian pasta puttanesca to Turkish meze.
So while it’s tempting to conflate a plate with a place, food narratives — and who gets to maintain them — are never set in stone. One need only look at the recent collapse in microbe diversity now putting brie, camembert and other French cheeses at risk of extinction.
