Istanbul: Going Deeper

You may have had enough of museums, but Orhan Pamuk’s new Museum of Innocence in the Bohemian neighbourhood of Cihangir is worth a visit, if only for the abiding oddness of the concept as much as anything in the exhibits. The museum and Pamuk’s eponymous novel were conceived at the same time, and as Turkey’s Nobel Prize-winning author wrote the book about love and obsession set in 1970s Istanbul, he also collected artefacts. The result is a charming confection of the paraphernalia of bourgeois Turkish life, from a collection of cigarette butts supposedly smoked by the novel’s heroine to toys, cinema posters and Victorian-era family photos. It’s a monument to whimsy, a great literary project and a vanished era all at the same time.

Istanbul is one of the gourmet capitals of the world, but you have to dig a little to find its most interesting vernacular food. To really get to grips with the authentic tastes of the city, spend half an hour browsing www.istanbuleats.com, a site (and for the old-fashioned, a book) compiled by passionate connoisseurs of Istanbul’s waterside fish-grilling joints, its raucous raki-and-mezze restaurants (known as meyhanes), and its endless varieties of street food. You can trace the social history of the city through its restaurants, or take a gastronomic tour of the rest of Turkey and even the old empire, with its Balkan, Middle Eastern and Caucasian influences. Anatolian soul food restaurant Ciya, the subject of a New Yorker profile, is definitely worth a trip to the Asian side of the city, while the new bread-and-stew restaurant Datli Maya is as brilliant and tiny as its owner, culinary wizard Dilara Erbay.