And then, I went over to Istanbul. I have been dying to go to Istanbul since... I was in 6th grade. When my parents went to Istanbul with a bunch of their friends, they thought that the city was quite interesting and the food divine. So, since I am much closer to Istanbul from Bologna than from Seoul or worse, Boston, I thought I would take the chance to head over to Istanbul with a couple of buds from Brown!
On the first day that we arrived (we all arrived from different parts of Europe, which I thought was fun on its one-- Alex from Oxford, and Hannah from Barcelona). Then, we went to a restaurant recommended by Fodor's guide for dinner but it was pretty uneventful in terms of the food, so I am just going to go jump into the lunch on the second day.
We went over to Khorasani for lunch, and we had a great selection of food!
For shared appetizers, we had hummus:
And lentil balls!
The hummus had quite an intense chickpea flavor and it wasn't too strongly seasoned, but just enough which accentuated the delicate taste of the hummus. It was more pasty than smooth, but it wasn't too granular for it to be uncomfortable. Basically, really good hummus. The lentil balls were a lot more zestier than expected and it was basically eating a ball-form of lentil patty. It was also delicious. A lot more flavorful than expected as well.
We are not sure what the bread pictured underneath is called but we called it the WHALE BREAD. Cuz it looks like a whale.
For my main dish, I had pistachio-lamb kebabs. It was extremely greasy (and by that, I mean delicious) and the chunks of pistachios in them were also unbelievably good. The light salad on the side definitely helped as well.
My fellow vegetarian friends went for the vegetable cous cous. It was more like risotto than cous cous in that it was creamier and the cous cous was a lot more full-bodied than the cous cous that we were expecting but the flavor was so spot on! I may or may not have stolen quite a few scoops of this dish from them.
The typical touristy picture!!!
For dinner, we went over to the Asian side of Istanbul because: a. There was a great restaurant recommendation on that coast and b. Alex has never set food in Asia so we thought that this would be a very appropriate adventure for us to take on!
The restaurant is called "Çiya" and we went and got an appetizer buffet, where they weigh the food on your plate for you to get a price tag. I got babaganoush, hummus, stuffed grapeleaves, etc etc. They were all quite flavorful. The hummus had a stronger sesame taste than the hummus that we had in Khorasani. Personally, I preferred the one in Khorasani, but this one wasn't bad at all.
We also got a plate of falafel for us to share. They were quite moist on the inside and delicious. The yogurt sauce (If I remember correctly..) was also quite good!
Then for the main dish, I got this stew pictured below with lamb in it. I think the stew sauce was incredible.
The yogurt, green veggie lamb concoction pictured below was also quite good although I could not eat a lot of it in a row because of its tart nature.
Overall, the trip over to the Asian side of Istanbul was quite interesting. It was definitely less touristy, the food a little different, and definitely different scenery.
