Food in Turkey: Best Turkish Cuisines That Will Leave You Drooling For More!

The food in Turkey is worth planning a trip around. Start with menemen and simit at breakfast and lentil soup or kuru fasulye at a lokanta, then move on to İskender or Adana kebab, mezes at a meyhane, balık ekmek by the water, and baklava or künefe for dessert. Each region cooks differently: in a single week you can eat a sesame simit on an Istanbul ferry, olive-oil artichokes in Izmir, a clay-pot stew in Cappadocia and pistachio baklava in Gaziantep, which UNESCO has named a Creative City of Gastronomy.

Turkish cooking comes from many places: Ottoman palace kitchens, Anatolian farmhouses, Aegean olive groves, Black Sea fishing villages and the spice markets of the south-east. The country has seven geographic regions, and Turks eat three meals a day with tea poured in between. This guide covers 24 dishes, grouped the way Turks eat them: breakfast, soups and home cooking, kebabs and grills, mezes, street food, then sweets and drinks. For each one you get what it is, how it tastes, where it comes from and where to find a good version. That should be enough to order with confidence at a lokanta counter or a seaside meyhane.

Food in Turkey at a glance

Turkish breakfast foods: how kahvaltı works

Kahvaltı means "before coffee". It is a slow spread of small plates, eaten with glass after glass of black tea, and a weekend breakfast can last two hours. In the cities, look for places that advertise serpme kahvaltı, where dozens of small dishes arrive at the same time.

Menemen

Every morning, in cafés and homes across the country, someone is making menemen: soft-scrambled eggs cooked in a small pan with tomatoes, green peppers and, depending on who you ask, onion. It is cheap, and it needs nothing more than fresh bread.

It comes to the table bubbling in the shallow two-handled pan it was cooked in. You eat it from the pan, tearing off bread and scooping. The tomatoes and peppers go in first and cook until soft and sweet; the eggs follow and are stirred only lightly, so the result stays loose and juicy.

Whether onion belongs in it is a real national argument, and plenty of cafés will ask which side you are on. For a heartier plate, add white cheese or sucuk (spiced beef sausage).

Order a basket of fresh bread and pul biber (chilli flakes) with it. The juice at the bottom of the pan is the best part.

Simit

Dipped in grape molasses and coated with toasted sesame seeds before baking, this bread ring is the cheapest and most common breakfast in Turkey, a snack people eat on the go. Vendors stack them on trays or in red glass-sided carts, and commuters eat them on the way to work, often with a triangle of processed cheese or a glass of tea. The molasses turns the crust deep brown and gives it a slightly sweet, chewy bite; the sesame adds crunch. Istanbul simit is thin and crisp. In Ankara it is softer and darker.

You will find it at street carts across Istanbul, especially at the Eminönü and Karaköy ferry piers, and in simit bakeries in every town.

Bal kaymak

Kaymak is a thick clotted cream made from water buffalo or cow's milk, skimmed slowly from heated milk, and served with honey on bread, usually at a weekend breakfast with tea. It costs a little more than the rest of the spread. What you get is a rich, slightly tangy cream thick enough to slice. With a pool of honey, often still on the comb, and fresh bread, it is the indulgent centre of a Turkish breakfast. The most prized kaymak is made from water buffalo milk, a speciality of the Afyon region and of a few traditional dairies in Istanbul.

Try it at the breakfast cafés of Beşiktaş in Istanbul, known as the "breakfast street", or at dairy shops in Afyon.

Sucuklu yumurta

On a hungry morning, order a pan of sucuk, a dry, garlicky beef sausage, sliced and fried in a copper pan with eggs cracked over it. It is a budget plate, eaten with bread and tea.

Sucuk is seasoned with garlic, cumin and red pepper. In a hot pan it releases spiced red fat, and the eggs cook in it while the yolks stay runny. It is heavy, so most tables share one pan alongside cheese, olives and vegetables. Sucuk from Kayseri and Afyon is considered the best.

It is cooked and served in the same small two-handled pan (sahan), so eat it quickly while the egg is still soft.

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Turkish soups and home cooking at the lokanta

A lokanta is a canteen-style restaurant. Ready-cooked dishes sit in steel trays behind glass, and you point at what you want. Lokantas open early, feed workers at lunch and are the best value in the country. Go before 1pm, when the food is freshest.

Mercimek çorbası

Red lentils, onion and carrot make a smooth soup, finished with butter, paprika and a squeeze of lemon. Turks eat soup at breakfast, at lunch and late at night, and red lentil is the default. It is velvety, mild, filling and cheap. Squeeze in plenty of lemon and shake on chilli flakes from the table. Many restaurants bring bread free with it, and a bowl plus bread makes a full meal.

Look for a version with a drizzle of butter melted with red pepper, which floats on top in bright orange streaks. Those are the best.

Kuru fasulye

Often called the national dish, kuru fasulye is dried white beans slow-cooked with onion, tomato paste and sometimes lamb or pastırma, served with rice pilaf. It is a cheap weekday lunch in homes, school canteens and army mess halls. Good beans are soft and creamy but keep their shape, and the sauce is thick and red. It comes with buttery pilaf and a plate of pickles; some people mix all three together.

Classic bean houses near the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul serve little else, and every lokanta has a version.

Karnıyarık

The name means "split belly", which is exactly what happens to the eggplant: whole ones are fried, split down the middle, stuffed with minced meat, onion, tomato and peppers, then baked. Frying first makes the flesh silky; baking with the meat filling and tomato sauce pulls it all together. Eat it with rice and yogurt. It shows how much Turkish cooking leans on vegetables. Look for it in summer, when aubergines are cheap and at their best.

İmam bayıldı

"The imam fainted", so the story goes, when he tasted this eggplant stuffed with onions, garlic and tomatoes, cooked slowly in a lot of olive oil and served cold. Either it was pleasure, or he had just learned how much olive oil his wife had used. It belongs to the zeytinyağlı family: vegetables cooked in olive oil and served at room temperature, a large part of Aegean cooking. The onions turn sweet and almost jammy. Inexpensive and best with bread, it is one of the strongest vegetarian choices on any menu.

Lokantas everywhere make it, as do the Aegean restaurants in Izmir that specialise in olive oil dishes.

Mantı

Kayseri in central Anatolia is the home of mantı, small dumplings filled with spiced minced meat, boiled, then topped with garlic yogurt and butter melted with red pepper. The dumplings there are so small that a traditional test of a cook is fitting 40 on one spoon. Hot dumplings, cold garlicky yogurt and sizzling chilli butter: the combination is hard to stop eating. Dried mint and sumac go on top. It is a family-meal dish, priced from budget to mid-range, and ayran goes well with it. Some places serve a baked version, crispier and sometimes finished with broth.

Ask for extra yogurt. The dumplings soak it up faster than you expect.

Turkish kebabs and grilled meat you should try

In Turkey, kebab covers dozens of dishes, from skewers over charcoal to meat cooked in clay pots. Ordering "a kebab" without a name is like ordering "pasta" in Italy. These are the ones to know.

İskender kebap

Bursa's famous doner plate was created there in the 19th century and takes its name from the family that invented it: thin slices of doner meat over cubes of pide bread, covered with tomato sauce and sizzling butter, served with yogurt. The meat, traditionally lamb, cooks on a vertical spit and is sliced thinly over the bread. Tomato sauce goes on next, then melted butter poured at the table so it hisses. It is rich, heavy and mid-range in price: a lunch dish with ayran, best followed by a long walk.

Go to Bursa, where the founding family's restaurant still operates, or to İskender specialists in Istanbul and Ankara.

Adana kebap

Hand-minced lamb and tail fat mixed with red pepper, pressed onto wide flat skewers and grilled over charcoal: Adana kebab comes from the southern city of the same name and has protected status, which sets out how it must be made. The meat is chopped with a long curved knife, kneaded with pepper and fat, and shaped by hand around the skewer. It arrives with flatbread, grilled tomatoes and peppers, and a salad of onion and parsley dusted with sumac. Order it for dinner with şalgam or ayran. Urfa kebab is the same idea without the heat.

Wrap a piece of kebab in flatbread with onion salad and a grilled pepper. That one bite is the whole dish.

Testi kebabı

Dinner in Cappadocia often means the pottery kebab: meat and vegetables slow-cooked for hours in a clay pot sealed with dough, which is broken open at the table. The waiter brings the pot over, sometimes still in flames, and cracks the neck off with a knife or hammer. Inside is a tender stew of lamb or beef with tomatoes, peppers and garlic, eaten with rice or bread. The show is a big part of why it is such a popular mid-range dinner in Göreme and Ürgüp.

Restaurants in Göreme, Ürgüp and Avanos all serve it.

Köfte

Turkish meatballs are grilled or pan-fried patties of minced meat seasoned with onion, cumin and herbs, and every region has its own. İnegöl köfte is soft and juicy. Tekirdağ köfte is oblong and spiced. Akçaabat köfte from the Black Sea coast is flavoured with garlic, and içli köfte is a bulgur shell stuffed with spiced meat.

Köfte shops (köfteci) and the classic Istanbul köfte restaurants serve grilled meatballs with piyaz, a salad of white beans, onion and parsley in vinegar and olive oil, plus pickled peppers. It makes a quick, cheap everyday lunch.

Mezes and starters in Turkish cuisine

Mezes are small cold and hot dishes eaten at the start of a meal. They matter most in a meyhane, a tavern where rakı is poured and dinner can last all evening. Waiters often bring a large tray so you can point at what you want.

Haydari

This thick yogurt dip starts with süzme yoğurt, yogurt strained for hours, mixed with garlic, dried mint and sometimes white cheese, then finished with olive oil. It is thicker than most dips and spreads easily on bread. Garlic and mint give it a sharp, fresh taste. Order it as one of several cheap cold mezes on a meyhane night or at a fish restaurant. It also cools the palate between grilled meat and the heat of acılı ezme.

Acılı ezme

Tomatoes, peppers, onions and parsley are chopped so finely with a large knife, then mixed with pomegranate molasses and chilli, that this spicy salad becomes almost a relish: tangy from the molasses, hot from the pepper, fresh from the parsley. Every kebab house brings it to the table with the grills. At many ocakbaşı grills it comes free with bread and kebabs, so you may not need to order it.

Hand-chopped ezme beats any blended version, because you still taste each vegetable.

Yaprak sarma

Vine leaves rolled around rice with onions, pine nuts, currants and spices and cooked in olive oil are a cheap vegetarian staple, served cold with lemon, each roll tight, thin and about the size of a finger. A version filled with meat and rice is served hot, often with yogurt, so ask which one you are getting. Making sarma is a family job, and home cooks judge each other on how thin they roll.

Every meyhane and many lokantas have it. Aegean restaurants make the best olive oil version.

Sigara böreği

Cigarette börek gets its name from the shape: thin yufka pastry rolled around white cheese and parsley and fried until crisp. They come to the table hot, crackle when you bite, and hold soft, salty cheese inside. You will see this cheap snack as a hot meze, at breakfast and with afternoon tea at home, and it goes as well with rakı as with tea.

Börek shops also sell larger kinds by weight in the morning, such as su böreği (layered and boiled) and kol böreği. Eat sigara böreği fresh; it turns soft within an hour.

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Street food in Turkey worth stopping for

The Turkish street foods worth stopping for are balık ekmek (fish sandwiches by the water), lahmacun, pide and midye dolma (stuffed mussels). Turkish street food is quick, cheap and good, sold from carts, small counters and even boats. These are the snacks most visitors end up eating more than once.

Balık ekmek

A grilled mackerel fillet in half a loaf of bread with onion, lettuce and lemon: the classic place for this fish sandwich is the Eminönü waterfront by the Galata Bridge in Istanbul, where boats grill the fish and pass sandwiches to customers on shore. It costs very little. Sit on a low stool, squeeze lemon over the fish, and drink a cup of pickle juice from the next stall. It is a local habit, and it works surprisingly well with oily mackerel.

Lahmacun

Lahmacun leaves a wood-fired oven in under a minute: a very thin round of dough spread with minced meat, tomato, pepper and onion, crisp at the edges. Squeeze lemon over it, add parsley and onion, roll it up and eat with your hands. It is a cheap, quick lunch, and people usually order two at a time with ayran. The best come from a specialist lahmacun salonu, and from the south-east, especially Gaziantep and Urfa, where the topping is spicier.

Pide

Think of pide as the Turkish answer to pizza: an oval, boat-shaped flatbread folded at the edges and baked with toppings such as cheese, minced meat, egg or sucuk. The dough is filled, baked in a wood oven, then cut into strips and brushed with butter. It is inexpensive, good for lunch or dinner, and pairs with ayran. Black Sea pide is the famous one; in Trabzon a closed version is filled with cheese and butter and finished with an egg.

Pide salons operate in every town; for the regional styles, go to Black Sea cities such as Trabzon and Samsun.

Midye dolma

Late at night, sellers walk the streets of Istanbul and Izmir with trays of stuffed mussels, filled with spiced rice, pine nuts and currants and eaten cold with lemon. They charge by the piece, so it stays cheap. Each shell is opened, squeezed with lemon and handed over until you say stop. The rice is fragrant with cinnamon and allspice. Freshness matters, so buy only from busy vendors.

Locals use the empty half-shell as a spoon for the next one.

Turkish desserts and sweets

The Turkish desserts to try are baklava, künefe and dondurma. Turks have a sweet tooth, and pastry shops stay open late. Desserts fall into two families: syrupy pastries such as baklava, and lighter milk puddings.

Baklava

Gaziantep baklava, made with bright green Antep pistachios, has protected status and sets the standard for this celebration dessert of paper-thin pastry layers filled with pistachios or walnuts, baked and soaked in syrup. Good baklava is crisp on top, moist underneath and not too sweet, and best with Turkish tea or coffee. Shops sell it by weight, by the kilo or in small boxes for travel, at mid-range prices. Variants include şöbiyet with cream, sarma rolled into cylinders, and kuru baklava, which is drier and travels well.

Specialist baklava houses in Gaziantep and in Istanbul's Karaköy district are the places to buy it.

Künefe

Hatay, in the far south, gave Turkey künefe: shredded kadayıf pastry baked with unsalted stretchy cheese in a small metal plate, soaked in syrup and topped with pistachios. Salty cheese against sweet syrup makes this hot cheese pastry one of the most satisfying after-dinner desserts in the country, best with tea. It is baked to order in a small round pan, so expect to wait about 10 to 15 minutes, then eat it at once while the cheese still stretches and the pastry is crisp.

The unsalted cheese used in Hatay is the key ingredient. Outside the south-east, look for restaurants that name Hatay or Antakya on the menu.

Dondurma

Salep (flour from orchid tubers) and mastic resin thicken Turkish ice cream and give it a chewy, stretchy texture. It is so firm that vendors knead it with long metal paddles and play tricks on customers, handing over the cone and pulling it back again. Kahramanmaraş is the home of the style, and there it is often eaten with a knife and fork, sometimes alongside baklava. In summer, vendors sell it cheaply all over Istanbul's tourist areas.

Regional specialities across Turkey

Turkish food changes noticeably as you cross the country: Istanbul and Marmara mix every regional style, the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts cook with olive oil and herbs, the Black Sea is known for anchovies and cornbread, and the south-east for spice and pistachios. Here is what each region does best.

Istanbul and Marmara: the meeting point

• Istanbul: balık ekmek, midye dolma, meyhane mezes and Ottoman-inspired dishes
• Istanbul street food: kokoreç (grilled lamb intestines) and tantuni-style wraps late at night around Taksim and Beşiktaş
• Bursa: İskender kebap and candied chestnuts; the city's Kebapçı İskender restaurants claim the original İskender recipe, served with melted butter at the table
• Edirne: fried liver, served thinly sliced with onions and chilli
• Where to try it: Kadıköy market on the Asian side of Istanbul has fishmongers, delis and meze shops in a few walkable streets, a good place to taste the region in one morning; Bursa is about two hours from Istanbul by fast ferry and road

Aegean and Mediterranean: olive oil and herbs

• Izmir: boyoz pastry, kumru sandwiches and olive oil vegetable dishes
• Wild greens: gathered and dressed with olive oil and lemon
• Antalya: piyaz made with tahini, a local twist on the bean salad
• Zeytinyağlılar: vegetables cooked in olive oil and served cold, such as artichokes, green beans and leeks, a staple across the Aegean
• Seafood: grilled sea bream, octopus and calamari in the harbour towns from Çeşme to Kaş
• When to go: spring brings wild greens and artichokes, and the Alaçatı Herb Festival in April celebrates them; summer is best for seafood on the coast, though prices rise in resort towns

Black Sea: anchovies and cornbread

• Hamsi: anchovies fried in corn flour or baked with rice in hamsi pilavı
• Muhlama: melted cheese with cornmeal and butter
• Trabzon: closed pide with butter and egg
• Akçaabat köfte: grilled meatballs from the town near Trabzon
• Rize tea: most of Turkey's tea is grown on the hills around Rize
• Hamsi season: anchovies are at their best from late autumn into winter
• Kuymak and laz böreği: another name for the cheese and cornmeal dish, and a custard-filled pastry from the eastern Black Sea, found in Trabzon and Rize bakeries; the region is reached by flights to Trabzon

South-east: spice and pistachios

• Gaziantep: baklava, beyran soup and dozens of kebabs
• Urfa: mild kebab and isot pepper
• Şanlıurfa: çiğ köfte (now made without raw meat), isot-spiced kebabs and late-night liver skewers around the old bazaar
• Hatay: künefe and a cuisine influenced by the Levant
• Gaziantep and Hatay: both are UNESCO Creative Cities of Gastronomy, Gaziantep since 2015 and Hatay since 2017
• Adana: the hand-minced, spicy Adana kebab and şalgam, a fermented turnip drink
• Mardin: stuffed ribs (kaburga dolması) and almond sweets
• Planning: the south-east is far from the tourist coast, so fly to Gaziantep or Adana; check your government's current travel advice for areas near the Syrian border

Turkish food by season

Spring: March to May

• Artichokes in olive oil
• Fresh broad beans
• Green almonds
• Lamb dishes

Summer: June to August

• Karnıyarık and stuffed vegetables
• Watermelon with white cheese
• Dondurma

Autumn: September to November

• Fresh walnuts and figs
• Pomegranates
• The start of hamsi season

Winter: December to February

• Hamsi on the Black Sea
• Salep and boza
• Hot soups and stews

Seasons matter more in Turkey than many visitors expect, because lokantas and home cooks follow the market. During Ramadan, bakeries sell round Ramazan pidesi in the afternoon and restaurants serve set iftar menus at sunset. Late summer brings fresh figs on the Aegean, and peppers and tomatoes laid out to dry in the south-east. In winter, look for hot boza, a fermented millet drink sold by street vendors in Istanbul at night, and salep sprinkled with cinnamon. Ask what is in season (mevsimlik) at the market or lokanta; the answer usually points to the best dish of the day.

Drinks to pair with Turkish food

Tea is the everyday drink, strong and black in small tulip-shaped glasses. You will be offered it in shops, offices and homes, and many restaurants serve it free after meals. Turkish coffee, thick, with the grounds settled at the bottom, usually follows a meal with a piece of lokum. Ayran, a salty yogurt drink, goes with kebabs and pide. Şalgam, a fermented purple carrot juice from Adana, is the traditional partner for spicy kebabs.

In winter, try salep, a hot milky drink thickened with orchid flour and dusted with cinnamon, or boza, a thick fermented millet drink topped with roasted chickpeas. Rakı, the anise spirit that turns cloudy white with water, is the classic match for mezes and fish, and it is drunk slowly. Alcohol is easy to find in cities and resorts but can be scarce in conservative towns, so ask before ordering.

How a Turkish meal is structured

A full Turkish dinner runs in stages. Soup or cold mezes come first, then hot starters such as sigara böreği or fried calamari, then the main course: grilled meat, fish, or a stew with rice. Fruit follows, often melon or whatever is in season, cut at the table, and then dessert with tea or coffee. At a meyhane the mezes are the main event, and the evening can stretch for hours with music, conversation and slow refills.

Lunch is quicker. Office workers eat soup and one or two dishes at a lokanta, or a pide or lahmacun, and finish with tea. Dinner starts later than in northern Europe, usually from about 8pm, and later still in summer. During Ramadan, many families break the fast at sunset with dates, soup and the flat Ramadan pide sold only during that month.

Tips for eating out in Turkey

When eating out in Turkey, go to a lokanta before 1pm, when the morning's dishes are freshest, expect free bread in most restaurants, tip around 10 percent at sit-down restaurants, and ask for zeytinyağlı dishes or say "etsiz" (without meat) if you are vegetarian. Most meat is halal.

• Eat lokanta food early. Lokanta dishes are cooked in the morning and are best before 1pm. By evening the choice shrinks.
• Bread is free. Most restaurants bring bread at no charge and refill it. Some charge a small cover, so check the menu.
• Tipping. Around 10 percent is usual in sit-down restaurants. In lokantas, rounding up is enough.
• Halal by default. Most meat in Turkey is halal and pork is rarely served, which makes travel easy for Muslim visitors.
• Vegetarian options. Ask for zeytinyağlı (olive oil) dishes, mezes, lentil soup and cheese pide. "Etsiz" means without meat.
• Two phrases. Say "afiyet olsun" to wish others a good meal and "elinize sağlık" to thank the cook.

Planning a food trip across several cities? Compare flights to Turkey, read our Turkey travel guide and see the top things to do in Istanbul. For guided tastings, browse our tours.

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