 | |
 |
 |
Turkey Tonight1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Itinerary | Home Just back from Paris (and New York and London), a global group of young Turks is taking Istanbul by the Golden Horn.
“Istanbul is the only city where no one restaurant is in the same place for 12 months,” says Savaş Ertunç as we sit inside a glass cube atop an Art Nouveau mansion. “Come summer, everything moves to rooftops and to the Bosphorus.” We’re eating cinnamon-scented lamb and fried zucchini flowers stuffed with lor (a salted Turkish ricotta), a modernized version of his grandmother’s Anatolian recipe, at his restaurant Müzedechanga. Surely, this is an exaggeration, given the logistics, but he is underlining what I’d heard about how much Istanbullus nourish themselves on change. “Hell,” Ertunç says, “in this city, they change menus mid-course.” Hell, I want to add, Atatürk seemingly changed the alphabet over lunch. Ertunç and his partner, Tarik Bayazit, opened the industrial-chic Changa restaurant eight years ago, becoming major players behind the historic city’s new fashionable face. They followed it with Müzedechanga, where the sexy, stylish crowd now eats updated Turkish cuisine in architect Ayşen Savaş’ cube amid 1960s-inspired furniture by hot Turkish design group Autoban. Müzedechanga sits on the top floor of the Sakip Sabanci, an Art Nouveau house that the Sabancş family, Turkey’s Rockefellers, recently transformed into a museum. Müzedechanga is just one of many remarkably creative restaurants and bar-design concepts here that are attracting as much global attention as the music and food coming out of them. |
24-hour party people: Just a typical Wednesday night on the corner of Nevizade and Balo.