Red (and green) hot chilli peppers

Here at LUXE City Guides, we believe in getting a local’s perspective. After all, our guides are written by editors who are resident in each destination. The whole wide world of the internet has also opened our eyes to plenty of fantastic blogs, many of which are written by locals who are clearly passionate about their city. We’ve asked some of our faves to appear here on LUXEtasy as occasional guest writers. To start, we bring you Yigal and Ansel of the self-explanatory Istanbul Eats, who take us on a lipsmacking tour through the area of Aksaray, or as they’ve dubbed it, Little Urfa, near the ancient centre Sultanahmet. So, without further ado, let’s hand it over to the boys.

Merhaba! [photo by Angela Kan]

Istanbul may be a city of some 15 million, but it often feels more like a collection of little villages that have been strung together. It’s one of the things that makes the city so charming, especially along the Bosphorus and in some of the city’s historic districts, such as Beyoglu and Sultanahmet.

The Aksaray area, a bustling district not far from Sultanahmet, won’t win any prizes in the charm department, but lately we’ve been finding ourselves spending more and more time there. The neighborhood is home mainly to migrants from Turkey’s southeast region and, as a result, has an especially lively food scene, with countless small restaurants serving up the assertively spiced and utterly delicious food from that region.

Grill meister Veysel at Urfali Haci Usta

One part of Aksaray, the atmospheric area around Ragip Bey Street that we’ve dubbed “Little Urfa” because of the plethora of restaurants there serving food from that southeastern Turkish city, is particularly worth a visit. In Turkey, ancient Urfa (called Edessa in Roman times) is best known as the supposed birthplace of Biblical patriarch Abraham and the actual birthplace of Ibrahim Tatlises, the undisputed heavyweight champ of the Turkish Arabesque music scene. The city is also known as a major food spot, famous for its dried red peppers and its kebabs, especially grilled liver. During a visit a few years ago to Urfa – which seems to have two kebab houses for every resident – a local “historian” told us that the town was also the birthplace of yoghurt and (perhaps more plausibly) çig kofte, both invented, he claimed, by Abraham himself (the Biblical figure, not the singing star).

What is sure is that it’s hard to go wrong when it comes to eating in “Little Urfa.” A good place to start is neighborhood veteran Urfali Haci Usta (Ragip Bey Sok. 23/B; +90 (212) 534 9962), where grill master Veysel turns out mighty fine kebabs. We are partial to the patlican kebab, chunky discs of fatty minced meat that are interlaced on a skewer with big hunks of eggplant and which are then all grilled together, as well as the fistik kebab, meat minced with chopped pistachios. Our kebabs arrived accompanied by a mound of chewy flatbread and various small plates holding parsley, sliced onion, grilled tomato and peppers and an ezme (chopped tomato, onion and parsley) salad flavored with dried red pepper that gave it an intensely earthy and rich flavor.

More pepper, Pierre?

A few doors down from this spot is another neighborhood classic, Hatay Has Kral Sofrasi (Ragib Bey Sok. 25/A; +90 (212) 534 9707). The food in this restaurant comes from another part of southern Turkey, the Hatay region near the Syrian border, and has a more pronounced Middle Eastern flavor to it. We started our meal with a number of meze that we know and love from the Hatay kitchen – a zingy zahtar (fresh thyme) salad, fattush, or green salad riddled with crunchy fried pide chips, and lubnan ezmesi, which combined a salty soft cheese with roasted eggplant yogurt and dried red peppers. The starters, along with one of our favorite guilty pleasures between courses, icli kofte (minced meat stuffed inside a bulgur shell), were delicious. The kebabs here were also outstanding, particularly one made of minced meat that was riddled with flavorful pine nuts.

Lamb soup for the soul

Could it be worth making the trip to “Little Urfa” just for a bowl of soup? We believe so, especially if that soup is beyran çorbasi, a stupendously delicious lamb-based broth that is usually slurped down for breakfast in Gaziantep, a city not far from Urfa. Ehli Kebap (Simitçi Şakir Sok. 32; +90 (212) 631 3700), a large grill house around the corner from these other two spots, prepares this soup exceptionally well. Each serving of soup is made to order, cooked up inside its own metal bowl, the usta creating it like a kind of hot and soupy ice cream sundae. First up is a schmear of suet, the shortening-like fat found around the kidney of a sheep, to give the soup some silkiness. Piled on top of that is a mound of white rice and strands of lamb meat that has been slow-cooked for hours, until it is utterly tender, which give the soup its heft. To ratchet up the taste, the usta then adds a dollop of minced garlic to the bowl, and tops the whole thing with liberal sprinkles of light and dark red-pepper flakes. The bowl is then put on a blazing gas burner and a ladleful of broth of an unfathomable depth of flavor is added to it, the whole thing coming to a quick boil. By the time the beyran soup arrives at the table, it has achieved a lovely rusty red color, looking – and even tasting – something like a Turkish version of a Louisiana gumbo.

Cheese, carbs and sugar, crispy and golden brown. Mmm… [photo by stu_spivack/Flickr]

As you walk around this area, you’ll notice that most places have a cook in the front preparing a fresh batch of kunefe, a dessert made out of crumbled fresh cheese that is sandwiched between two thin layers of shredded wheat and then cooked in a pan over an open fire until golden brown. Our experience has been that no self-respecting restaurant in the area could survive if it served subpar kunefe, leaving you with a wide-open field to choose from. Enjoy!

Visit the Istanbul Eats blog here. They also run custom food tours – for details and more fabulous finds in Istanbul, check out the LUXE Istanbul guide and Mobile App.