When Karaköy was still “the docks” and filled with shop windows advertising boat tickets to Odessa alongside cubby-sized import and export offices, Karaköy Lokantası felt like a culinary mirage. With great food, personable service and tasteful décor, this family-operated eatery stood out, prominently, among the humble street-side eateries filled with noshing stevedores. These days, snapshots from the neighborhood could have fallen from the pages of the hipper-than-thou Monocle magazine, and Karaköy Lokantası fits in nicely with its new, trendy neighbors.

If there are an estimated 17 million souls in Istanbul, then there are at least that many opinions on the best kebab house in town. There are stodgy oak-paneled rooms with country-club appeal, where well-dressed businessmen marvel at heaping plates of delicious grilled meat. And there are 24/7 hole-in-the-walls, where lines form out the door for kebab that is just as tasty and expertly cooked.

Behind 2,340-year-old Kallimarmaro Stadium, located in the picturesque area of Athens between Mets and Pagrati, lies a scene that would not be out of place in a provincial city: small neighborhoods, old houses, hilly roads, stray cats, a couple of abandoned houses and old taverns. Among the last, we love Vyrinis, which is especially old and now in the hands of the third generation of the same family. The restaurant has been renovated and updated but still retains some elements of the old tavern, such as the huge wine casks that serve as decoration and the small backyard. Here, young and old contentedly intermingle, and the friendly, always smiling waiters add to the cozy, welcoming atmosphere.

For us, one of the highlights of spring in Istanbul is a visit to Çiya Sofrası, the Asian-side eatery that is very likely the best restaurant in Istanbul. It’s certainly not the fanciest or most cutting-edge place in town, but we rarely leave Çiya without having a profoundly new and memorable taste experience. Thanks to glowing write-ups in numerous other places, Çiya – along with a sister restaurant across the street serving excellent kebabs – is no longer the off-the-beaten-path secret it once was. But the restaurant – located on a quiet, pedestrian-only street in the Kadıköy neighborhood’s bazaar – has remained true to what has made it successful in the first place.

Finding a kebab restaurant in Istanbul is not hard. There must be thousands of them. But finding the right kind of place, especially if you want to make it a bit more of a meal, can be surprisingly difficult. Most kebab joints tend to be no-frills, in-and-out places. Some are very good (and we will review a few in the future), but they don't make for a night out. On the other hand, some of nicer places – where you can find a more extensive menu and, more importantly, drink booze with your dinner – take things too far. Tuxedoed waiters serving kebab? Griller, please! At the end of the day, we're still talking about meat on a stick cooked over a fire.

Editor’s note: Antiochia has moved to a new location. In Istanbul, we’ve noted an inverse relationship between a restaurant’s atmosphere and what’s coming out of the kitchen. In most cases, as furniture design goes slick, as bathrooms get properly lit and ventilated, as the wait staff becomes customer-savvy, the quality of the kitchen inevitably goes down. Presumably, there are those in Istanbul who go out to eat and those who go out to sit in chic restaurants, and never the two shall meet. But just when we thought this theory was watertight, we stumbled upon Antiochia – a small restaurant in Beyoğlu that exudes cool without sacrificing flavor.

At 6 p.m. on a Monday evening, the dining room of Adana Ocakbaşı was nearly full and the wide grill in the corner was covered with skewers loaded with meat. While most restaurants, worldwide, were closed or waiting for a slow night to start, this neighborhood kebab house was busting through a bumper rush of early birds in for a quick lamb chop or two on the way home. The dinner crowd had not even arrived.

Istanbul’s after-midnight dining options tend to be of the offal variety – tripe soup, chopped lamb’s intestines – thought to be curatives after a night of hard drinking. Luckily, not all late-night eats in the city involve innards. At Dürümzade – a grill joint positioned right on the fringe of the rowdy, bar-lined streets of the Beyoğlu’s fish market – we’ve found a dürüm, or Turkish wrap, that’s equally satisfying at 2 a.m. or 2 p.m.

Known for its excellent fish and seafood, the port town of Piraeus, just west of Athens, was not until recently a destination for meat lovers. But that all changed a year ago with the opening of Bar Bee Kiou. Situated in the center of town, a two-minute walk from Zea Harbor, this tiny eatery is the ideal place to cap off a promenade around picturesque Pasalimani.

Near the Aksaray metro station, set back from a loveless part of Istanbul crossed by wide roads and overpasses, the kebab is flourishing. Over the past few decades, waves of migration have brought a particularly southeast Anatolian flavor to the otherwise drab apartment blocks and government buildings of this part of the Fatih district. Now bright isot peppers are strung up, handwritten signs in Arabic advertise services in barbershop windows, a nargile café is filled with older men smoking and playing cards. Nowhere else in the city is there such a high density of kebab restaurants and most of them are run by families from the southeastern city of Urfa.

We generally regard the Grand Bazaar as a place of punishment, a den of aggressive, wolf-like hustlers and innocent, lamb-like tourists wearing novelty fez hats. When we have to go, we like to think of ourselves as members of a prison SWAT team, sent in to search a cell for some specific item – Turkmen jewelry, hamam towels and, once, wedding rings.

Southeastern Turkey’s culinary mecca of Gaziantep is best known for its baklava and kebabs. But lately we’ve been thinking that it's soup that may actually be the city’s real crowning glory. Not just any old soup, mind you, but beyran çorbası, a stupendously delicious lamb-based broth that is usually slurped down for breakfast in Gaziantep.

In 1922, reporting for the Toronto Daily Star from the borderlands of the Thrace region, Ernest Hemingway wrote of a “Silent, Ghastly Procession” of Christian refugees fleeing the advance of “the Turk.” The literature and art of the Christian Anatolians exiled in this period – from the films of Angelopoulos to the genre of Rembetiko music itself – is considerable and no doubt strengthens the identity of this diaspora today.

In our imaginary primetime lineup, a reality show called “Pimp My Kebab Salon” transforms a drab kebab shop into a grill palace suited to the tastes of the latter-day sultans. Surfaces are suddenly gilded in gold, fountains appear and everything is reupholstered under the watchful eye of the boisterous host with tacky taste. If this TV series existed, a much-loved classic episode would take place at Hatay Has Kral Sofrası, a zany kebab restaurant in a part of the Aksaray district filled with lots of other establishments selling food from Southeast Turkey.

Editor’s note: This post wraps up our special series this week featuring our top street food picks in all of the Culinary Backstreets cities. As rapidly as Istanbul marches toward its modern destiny, street food in this city is still served the old-fashioned way, by boisterous ustas with a good pitch and, sometimes, a really good product.