Kevin Gould meets the men who quit corporate drudgery to restore Istanbul’s foodie reputation
For 400 years and more, Constantinople dictated fashions far beyond the boundaries of its own empire. Textiles, garden design, architecture, foods and, especially, spices were enthusiastically exported from the Sublime Porte via the Sultan’s sharp-eyed Genoese agents. To eat à la Turca was to feast like a king and today’s Istanbul (as modern, wealthy Constantinople now calls itself) still offers some of the most sublime eating in the world. Follow your nose and you will smell the heady, evocative aromas of spicy liver from Albania, juicy Balkan köfte, Levantine mezze, Egyptian grills, Kurdish baked desserts, Circas-sian boiled desserts, Caucasian walnut dishes, egg dishes from North Africa, fish fresh from the Aegean and Black seas… Yet for all of its riches, its culinary heritage, its insatiable appetite to devour the fashionable and the new, Istanbul – for the longest time – lacked a truly chic, internationally admired restaurant. Until, that is, Tarik Bayazit and Savas Ertunc came back to town.
These smart, energetic 40-year-olds have opened not one, but two of the world’s most exciting restaurants – Changa and its sister MüzedeChanga; style arbiter Wallpaper* magazine recently voted the latter its Best New Restaurant 2007.
When they met, Tarik and Savas were following careers with multinational corporations and both were becoming jaded, not just with the pursuit of promotion for promotion’s sake, but also with the lack of opportunity for artistic expression within the dry world of figures.
“Our careers gave us the chance to travel and to learn something of the world,” says Tarik in his rich baritone, while picking happily at grilled octopus made sensual with black olive paste and caperberries, “but there were frustrations – often to do with the fact that, when we came home, the restaurants here just seemed like bad copies of bad European places.”
Savas agrees. He’s slightly the more reticent of the two, with an impish wit that informs many of the dishes on the Changa menus: “Like just about every Turk, we both came from homes where food was the glue that bound us all together. We’d live food, talk food – and, of course, eat food! All day long.” Having opted to give up their day jobs, the partners decided they had to open a restaurant. Tarik takes a moment to polish his spectacles (and to explain that the bread on the table comes from the Black Sea, from Kastamonu to be exact, and arrives wrapped in chestnut leaves). “We wanted a small café at first,” he says, “but as we gained experience and confidence, so the idea grew into an 80-seater restaurant!”
The experience he describes started with Savas cooking shifts at the Çiragan Palace Kempinski hotel and with them both meeting their “absolute, all-time number-one favourite chef in the world” Peter Gordon. Gordon, a New Zealander by birth, was cooking in London (The Sugar Club, then Providores) and had become famous for his fusion of Southeast Asian, Antipodean and European flavours.
“Imagine our excitement when he agreed to work with us at Changa,” Savas says, still delighted, seven years on.
Changa is a beautiful space, a few moments from Taksim Square in Istanbul’s European new city. “Our architects gave us what we’d dreamed of,” says Savas, “a sleek, contemporary space in a building that already had great spirit.” They opened Changa in October 1999 and immediately attracted Istanbul’s cognoscenti, eager to experience what less fashionable Turks would be eating ten years hence. The place was full from the start. Gordon’s inspired menu mixed Bosphorus bonito casserole with mesquite-smoked tomatoes and Thai curry sauce. Salmon, blackened in the Asian way, was then married with bulgur wheat from Gaziantep, near to the Iranian border, Izmir raisins soaked in jasmine tea, preserved lemons in the Moroccan style and roasted almonds from the rocky Mediterranean hills. Sensational and, as Savas says, “really, really tasty!”
Success breeds success and, in 2005, the partners opened their second restaurant, MüzedeChanga, at the invitation of the Sabanci family, Turkey’s greatest industrialists. MüzedeChanga is a meander upstream, at Emirgan, where the Sakip Sabanci Museum, a restored family mansion, overlooks an especially glamorous stretch of the Bosphorus. Here, Tarik and Savas commissioned Autobahn, the Young Turks of interior design, to come up with something to match the majesty of the setting.
Having followed the ferries, fishermen and coasters up the Bosphorus, you come to the museum gates. Slowly they slide open and you pass through some serious security. A car awaits to drive you up the windy garden road to the museum: past Grecian statues you swank, the Bosphorus to your right, a flight of broad elegant steps to your left. You pass through a now silent museum to be greeted by the hubbub of conversation and the tinsel chink of glasses. Merhaba! You have arrived.
Less Asian-influenced than its sibling, MüzedeChanga’s menu displays some of Savas’ subtle wit with its fresh take on classic Turkish dishes. A traditional Turkish hangover cure is a rough tongue and cheese sandwich: here, it arrives as a cute tongue fritter, with a crust of çökelek cheese and a biting mustard sauce. Great play is made on village ingredients: lamb chops are paired with fireek, smoked green wheat; aged Kasar cheese is used where Italians might use Parmesan; bruschetta is flavoured with wild borage; Marmara pears are spiked with chili and poached in local red wine, then served with mastic-chewy ice cream, buffalo-milk clotted cream and vanilla-scented candy floss – this pismaniye being the candy that placates Turkish kids on long car journeys. The wine list is all Turkish and dinner is followed by Savas’ home-made bergamot liqueur.
All this is served with charm and energy in MüzedeChanga’s serene glass box or on the shady terrace as the Bosphorous sparkles and runs deep below.
“You like?” asks Tarik, as if he really had to. “Fashions come and go,” says Savas. “All we’re trying to do is to honour Turkey’s traditional foods in our own way.”
Tastes do change, but great-tasting food never goes out of fashion and the Changa way looks set to dictate food fashion in Istanbul – and beyond – for many years to come.
THE CHANGA RESTAURANTS
Changa
47 Siraselviler Caddesi, Taksim, tel +90 212 251 7064, www.changa-istanbul.com Closed June-September
MüzedeChanga
22 Sakip Sabanci Caddesi, Atlikösk, Emirgan tel +90 212 323 0901 Open 10.30am-1am Tue-Sun year round
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