When the neighborhood institution Öz Konak Lokantası closed back in December 2022, it left a hole in the bustling, bohemian-turned-touristy Cihangir for reliable, homestyle lunch and dinner food. And not just food, but a feeling of community and home that the restaurant had offered its former customers.
Dilara Eren, a chef and recipe developer, was, at that moment, finishing up a job as the Turkey community manager for a food recipe app and figuring out what was next in her career. She’d managed a big restaurant in the past and had been catering on the side, building a local following for her creative, delicious dishes. Neighborhood friends kept saying, “We need a new lunch place to replace Oz.” With that in mind, she opened Zerze, an inviting, new-generation lokanta on the busy main street that runs through the neighborhood.
In Istanbul, there are many esnaf lokantaları (workers’ lunch counters), with steam tables of stewed vegetables and meats, pilafs and cold salads. They range from basic to high quality, in ingredients as well as flavor profile (and price). Zerze takes that concept but plays with it, transforming classic dishes into unique bursts of flavor.
Dilara calls it “modern Turkish with a traditional twist.”
“I try to use … only olive oil and butter, special tomato paste from Antep, olives from Bodrum… Every day we have someone bringing us fruit and vegetables,” she says. “I try to go for the good ingredients.” Sourcing locally means she has a personal relationship with vendors and producers. “I’m a small business owner,” she says. “One thing that I like about that is that the interactions are close and sincere.”
For over two years, Dilara managed a restaurant with her father, where she also was in charge of the menu. But with such a large selection of dishes on offer, she couldn’t change the menu very often. Her catering experience, meanwhile, gave her more flexibility to experiment and take advantage of seasonal shifts.
Now, she pores through cookbooks, recipe sites and chefs’ Instagram accounts to find new flavor combinations and inspirations for using what’s fresh and in-season in Turkey, borrowing and riffing and giving credit where it’s due. Sometimes this means adding new flavors to classic dishes. Sometimes it’s taking a recipe from one place and adapting it to the produce available in Istanbul. “For instance, Europeans cook a lot with fennel but that’s harder to get here, so sometimes I would use the same recipe but put cabbage in instead,” she explains.
At Zerze, one might find lightly roasted cauliflower with fresh persimmons and roasted almonds; julienned carrots mixed with edamame, cucumbers, radishes and a heavy sprinkling of black sesame seeds. Yellow squash is sliced in ribbons and mixed with thinly sliced radishes and a soft, crumbly feta cheese. Shredded carrots get dressed not just with the traditional garlic yogurt, but also tahini and herbs. Mustard and poppy seeds elevate the standard potato salad, while spicy peppers and sundried tomatoes punch up a white bean salad. Chicken is stewed with fresh sage and oranges, and the triangle-wrapped dolma are bursting with perfectly cooked rice and a generous amount of lightly spiced ground meat.
A rotating menu means that new dishes are offered daily. There are always six to eight cold vegetable dishes, one hot meat dish (chicken, beef or lamb), one hot vegetarian dish, and a rice or bulgur pilaf. Bone broth is available every day in the winter, as is a vegetarian soup.
“We have maybe four hundred different recipes, but some things stay the same each day, like our green beans or some variation on hummus.”
Dilara loves traveling to eat and discover new foods, and has picked up different recipes from outside and around Turkey, like zucchini with apples, celery root and walnuts, inspired by a dish found around the Aegean coast. Zerze chefs Zafer Karatay and Begüm Duygu are also good at brainstorming new ideas. “We all like to learn and try to experiment with different sauces, different ingredients,” she says. She encourages them to also create new dishes. “I go into the kitchen as long as I don’t get kicked out,” she laughs. “Now they’re like, ‘Just tell us what you want and leave us to do it.’”
The name of the restaurant is inspired by an old Turkish word for fruits and vegetables: zerzevat. “I remember the old street sellers would walk around hawking vegetables, screaming ‘Zerzevat’!” Dilara recalls.
The food is not the only comforting thing about Zerze. After years of managing an almost industrial-level restaurant, Dilara wanted this place to have a casual, neighborhood vibe. A fresh coat of white paint, wooden tables with checkered tablecloths and mismatched chairs, and a plethora of plants give it a bright and welcoming feel. The vintage style extends to the plates and cutlery, which she has picked up at various flea markets and from friends and family.
“When I first opened the restaurant, I asked the women in my family for their old plates. Some of them were my grandmother’s that she got when traveling,” Dilara told us. A selection of those plates hang as art on the wall of the outdoor entrance room, including some which her grandmother picked up in Japan and Hungary.
Zerze also has a small breakfast menu, which includes options from the simple Turkish kahvaltı – tomatoes, cucumbers, cheese, olives – to avocado toast, to Dilara’s favorite, çılbır. The latter, a traditional breakfast dish of poached eggs in a garlicky yogurt sauce, gets the Zerze transformation with sauteed spinach and peksimet (dried bread rusks) from Dilara’s dad’s hometown of Demirci, in the province of Manisa.
On the sweet side, she offers one traditional dessert, Turkish sütlaç (rice pudding), and a selection of other treats, like dark chocolate brownies with cherries.
In this increasingly expensive neighborhood and local economy, Dilara tries to maintain reasonable prices. Workers from the neighborhood come in for a quick lunch, friends pop by for a meal or to sit and talk over tea, tourists – attracted, she says, by the vegetable-forward menu – often make repeat visits during their stay.
Despite having a master’s degree in communications, Dilara feels uncomfortable “selling” the restaurant through heavy marketing and has been relying on word-of-mouth. “I’ve never had somebody complain about the food, which is the hardest part of this industry because you can’t make everyone happy. People always love the food – it’s just a matter of getting them in here to try it.”
She caters, in part, to the younger generation of local customers, who are perhaps more likely to have traveled and tried different foods and flavors. But at the end of the day, Zerze – from the food, to the decor to the team who runs it – is designed to welcome everyone.
“It really is like a little family, like a family gathering,” Dilara says. “I don’t think I would do it any other way. It doesn’t make sense to have a restaurant unless you really love it. The thing is to be really passionate about food and about people.”
Karen CirilloKaren Cirillo
Published on April 29, 2024
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