As winter descends over Istanbul, cloaking the city in gray rain clouds that make for beautiful sunsets but unpleasant commutes, we flee the many open-air eating options in the city for cozier digs, replacing outdoor meyhane feasts and rakı toasts with homey bowls of lentil soup and steaming cups of tea. Yet when we’re craving a place that is warm in ways beyond food, the average Istanbul lokanta often leaves something to be desired. Which is why, on a recent rainy Friday evening, we were pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Galaktion, a Georgian restaurant on a cobbled side street off Taksim Square, smack dab between Istiklal Caddesi and Sıraselviler Caddesi.

On a blustery, drizzly winter afternoon in Istanbul, Muhittin Öztürk swipes his cell phone until he finds the photo he’s looking for: three men clad in blue aprons, standing behind a grill inside a small fishing boat. “That one’s my father, that one’s my uncle,” Öztürk says, pointing at the image. “This is the culture I come from.” Now a 35-year veteran of the business, Öztürk is the owner of the Derya, one of three gaudily adorned neo-Ottoman-style vessels moored to the shoreline in Eminönü, where a crew of cooks and waiters serve up fish sandwiches – balık ekmek (literally, “fish bread”) in Turkish – at a rapid pace to heaving crowds, most of whom are tourists.

On a drizzly, gray December afternoon, everything appeared to be business as usual at Istanbul’s Şahin Lokantası, a tradesmen’s restaurant in the heart of Beyoğlu that has been open for just over half a century. It was 4 p.m. and well after the lunch rush, but all the tables on the first floor of the small restaurant were occupied. We asked a lone diner if we could sit across from them, and they warmly obliged. Saying no would have been out of the question, this is just how things are at a place like Şahin Lokantası, an institution of lovingly-cooked classic Turkish dishes that have attracted a crowd of loyal customers over the decades that aren’t afraid to share tables with strangers.