Izmir eats with one foot in the bazaar and the other by the sea. This quick primer covers the old-school meyhanes, neighborhood markets, bars, restaurants, and essential dishes that help define the city’s food culture.

A family-run esnaf lokantası in İzmir’s Kemeraltı Bazaar known for fish soup, lamb kokoreç, ciğer sarma, tripe with chickpeas, and seasonal olive-oil vegetables from the family garden.

At the Olive Oil Library of Orhanlı, visitors taste oils from across Turkey and beyond while learning how olive cultivation shapes culture, landscape and memory.

Emir Yargın’s ideal day of eating in Izmir starts with soup in Kemeraltı, continues with exceptional söğüş, and ends over meze and rakı in Alsancak.

A staple of Izmir’s Sephardic kitchen, fongos is a baked spinach dish made with stale bread, eggs and cheese, often topped with a soft potato mixture. Shared by Jinet Sidi Sarfati, this traditional recipe reflects a cuisine shaped by care, resourcefulness and respect for every ingredient.

A walk through Izmir’s Kemeraltı Bazaar, where synagogues, tea houses, market stalls, and longtime local food vendors reveal the daily life of Turkey’s largest open-air market.

Every spring, when the winter chill still stubbornly clings to our skin in Istanbul, we feel relentlessly pulled to the south. There, the sunshine is unambiguously warming, the wildflowers pop like strewn confetti across the fields, and the sea sparkles like a bright blue promise. And also, there is wine.

With its prodigious array of baked goods, penchant for seasonal seafood, and reputation for excellent meze and olive oil-based dishes, Izmir has much to offer the curious and hungry visitor. Skillfully cooked organ meat and other unusual butcher cuts tempt here more than anywhere else, and true to Turkish mangal (barbecue) culture, charcoal-kissed skewers of kebab and grilled meatballs abound. Proudly secular Izmir is just as proud of the flowing rakı and beer in the city’s innumerable bars and meyhanes.

A deep dive into Izmir’s layered food culture, from boyoz and gevrek to kokoreç and midye, shaped by centuries of migration along Turkey’s Aegean coast.

A look at İzmir köfte, the beloved Turkish casserole of meatballs, potatoes and peppers baked in tomato sauce, plus a home-style recipe from food writer Özlem Warren.

In Turkey’s third-largest city, food is a fierce marker of identity, one where calling a gevrek a "simit" is a minor social offense and keeping tomatoes out of your kokoreç is a local mandate. While its glam big sister, Istanbul, tends to hog the international spotlight (and the mistakenly placed lion's share of culinary acclaim), Izmir is home to its own Sephardic legacies, Balkan influences, and a certain coastal defiance.

To say that the Izmir neighborhood of Basmane is rough around the edges would be an understatement, but there are more diamonds in the rough here than we can count. Next to the central train station, Basmane is just to the east of the vast and vibrant 17th-century Kemeraltı Bazaar and the Hellenistic-era Agora of Smyrna. Yet the neighborhood has a storied history in its own right, one that is as labyrinthine as its cluttered, hazy maze of streets.

Izmir’s quintessential sandwich, the kumru (the Turkish word for turtle dove), derives its name from the birdlike shape of the elegant, curved roll in which it is served. Throughout the Aegean coastal city, there are two varieties of this ubiquitous sandwich: One is served fresh from a cart with a slice of local tulum peynir (sharp white sheep’s cheese), tomatoes and optional green pepper. The other version is a greasy, salty and downright decadent configuration of grilled sucuk, salami, thinly sliced hot dog strips, two types of cheese, pickles, tomatoes and occasionally ketchup and mayo, dwarfing its humble predecessor. While the simpler kumru dates back to the mid-19th century, it was in the 1940s that sandwich shops started grilling them up with sausage and melted cheese.