After settling into your new home in Istanbul for the week, we’ll meet up for a welcome drink on our rooftop bar and then walk to our dinner at the private club Cuma. Along the way we’ll pop into some of Gonca’s favorite shops and get her recommendations for what to do and where to shop during our free time this week. Located inside a historic building on one of Istanbul’s most charming streets, Cuma serves smart updated takes on classic Turkish cooking. Expect the evening’s elegant menu to include seasonal vegetables, savory pastries, grilled meat and fish and, for dessert, a very decadent take on baklava.

We’ll begin our full-day crash course into the diversity of the Turkish kitchen with a private, pop-up breakfast inside a historic landmark. The table will be set with carefully selected ingredients from the whole of Turkey and plenty of çay, Turkish tea. From there we set off on a walking tour of hans – building-sized markets, each dedicated to a single trade, old and new – visiting ones that house everything from metalsmiths to textile merchants.
After weaving our way through the backstreets of the Bazaar quarter, we’ll gather for a hands-on workshop at a pide bakery with two masters. You’ll learn to shape, top and bake the breads before tasting them all.
Tonight is yours for an evening walk, rooftop drink, or a backstreet snack.

In the morning, our resident chef, Özlem Warren, will pick us up right after breakfast for a morning of shopping, cooking and feasting together. Our session together, which will take place in a private home and feature the flavors of Özlem’s home region, Antakya, in southern Turkey.

In the late afternoon, we’ll go on a tour of Beyoğlu, tasting our way through the historic district as day turns into night sampling street food and delicacies alike.

Istanbul sprawls in every direction. Yet somehow, in this megalopolis of 18-million people, a slice of rural life has managed to remarkably survive in the most unique historical setting. Between the Byzantine-era walls of the old city, literally in the old moats, small farms have existed since Ottoman times, growing produce that includes a beloved heirloom lettuce. We’ll spend the morning with a family who tends their garden and join them for a large family-style breakfast with produce fresh from the earth.
Popping through the walls themselves, we’ll tour the gardens in this historic area before heading to one of the city’s largest weekly food markets. Here we’ll get a crash course on the construction of Istanbul’s weekly outdoor neighborhood markets – which are, miraculously, set up and broken down each day like a traveling circus – before we wander through one in the Fatih neighborhood. There, we will have a quick lunch in an esnaf lokanta, or tradesmen’s restaurant, featuring the staples of home-style cooking that neighborhood workers line up for.

In the evening, we’ll be visiting a monument of another kind, the ultimate Istanbul kebab house, Zübeyir Ocakbaşı. Here we will be welcomed by the large extended family from southeast Turkey who run the place. We’ll be seated around the large copper-hooded grill facing the skewer-master, who will serve us omakase-style, with meze of char-grilled vegetables and tangy yogurt, herb-laced salads dressed with pomegranate molasses, delicate lamb chops and ribs and spicy Adana kebab served over heaps of fresh lavash.

On this day we’ll be focusing on the culinary contributions of Istanbul’s small but significant religious minority communities – local Greek Orthodox populations who have called Istanbul home since Byzantine times, Armenians with historic roots throughout Turkey and Sephardic Jews who arrived in Istanbul during the Spanish Inquisition. We’ll start with a visit to a private home to learn about Sephardic specialties with a cookbook author and her aunt, who carry on culinary traditions that reach back 500 years in this city and still retain their medieval Spanish names. We’ll get to know our hosts and their traditions as we dine together on what we’ve cooked. 

We’ll then go on a neighborhood tour featuring a number of tastings, stopping into several heritage shops and restaurants that represent these communities. We’ll sample freshly baked Easter bread in a Greek neighborhood club and taste stuffed mussels and topik, an unusual meze with Armenian roots, at a small charcuterie shop that serves the local community. The evening will be free for you to explore on your own.

In the morning, we head to bustling Beşiktaş, where fishmongers, greengrocers, and specialty food shops line the narrow pedestrian streets, offering a vivid snapshot of daily life. Here we’ll eat at a local breakfast specialist and then step into a baklava workshop to learn about – and taste – the delicate craft of making yufka, thin sheets of phyllo-like dough. After our lesson, we’ll sit down at a neighborhood döner spot for a simple, yet satisfying, lunch. 

In the afternoon, we will meet again for a hands-on cooking session led by Özlem, with a particular focus on the dishes of her home region, Antakya. Together we will sit down to enjoy the meal we have prepared, bringing the day’s discoveries from market to table.

By day, treat yourself to a Turkish hamam experience, shop for a Turkish coffee pot, or join a tour of our favorite Mosques and monuments. In the early evening, we will gather for a private Bosphorus cruise during aperitif hour. With a glass of wine in hand, we’ll sail past the waterfront summer palaces and small historic neighborhoods of the Asian and European sides of the city, getting a better sense of how the Bosphorus does not divide the city and the two continents it straddles but rather unites them.

Working up an appetite, we’ll finally settle in for our farewell dinner at an elegant local restaurant, which has a stunning view of the Bosphorus and serves some of the freshest fish to be found in Istanbul.