Culinary Secrets of the Old City

While tour buses unload groups for a set menu lunch beside the Egyptian Spice Market, we take to the backstreets in search of the shops and small restaurants that local Istanbulites will cross town to visit. Here is where locals line up to buy ground coffee by the kilo across from a cheese monger whose number is on speed dial of some of Istanbul’s best chefs. Here we enter the world of wholesalers and artisans who all have a hand in feeding the city.
To kick off our Istanbul Old City food tour, we’ll have breakfast with the shopkeepers in a traditional teahouse and then set off through the atmospheric, lesser-explored market streets around the Egyptian Spice Market, pressing on, deeper into the untouristed Fatih neighborhood. In Kantarcılar, a district that has been selling weights and measures since Ottoman times, we will visit a local confectionary where Turkish delight has been made and sold for four generations and meet the family upholding this tradition. From there we’ll visit an all-but-abandoned caravanserai where the simple pleasure of a cup of tea brings shopkeepers together through the day. We’ll see a couple of hidden historical sites, an Ottoman-era bozacı and, finally, a full lunch of traditional pit-roasted lamb in a very local, family-run place next to the Byzantine aqueduct (with lots of other edible treats along the way). Istanbul’s most enchanting places are where the medieval and the modern meet and this route through the Old City is a delicious glimpse of the life that exists at this juncture.