TURK Fatih Tutak
Meliz and I visited this restaurant last week. I was so impressed that I wanted to write on the experience
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Turkish version to be issued later. Time is precious in Istanbul.
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We went to TURK Fatih Tutak (TFT) last week. I loved it so much that I wanted to dedicate a whole post to it.
The TFT is in Now Bomonti building with its own street level entrance. When we approached the building, a young man in a formal suit asked us if we were after the TURK Fatih Restaurant and on confirmation he opened the door and took us in. I am glad he was there because otherwise we could have trouble locating the door which had a single inconspicuous TTF sign but otherwise was unadorned. On entrance, we found ourselves in a long hall with a window on our left looking into the restaurant kitchen. The entry into the restaurant was through another very sturdy door further down the hall. The staff greeted us first in English and then switched to Turkish when I said “Merhaba”. We later observed that almost all the customers in the restaurant that night were foreigners.
I had booked the Chef’s Table, which is a good place when you are a party of two. You are privy into how the food is being prepared and you can keep talking the whole night comparing your observations, which we did:
As soon as we took our seats, we were served small glasses of hot chicken broth flavoured with yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit. I could really feel the taste of citrus in the broth, which was a bit like lemon but not quite.
We opted to choose our own wine rather than following the suggested list and I asked the sommelier for an Elazig district bottle, Eski Bağlar. My choice was not available and he suggested Kuzeybağ Öküzgözü as an alternative. I accepted the suggestion. We had Kuzeybağ at Efendy and it was really good wine.
The quality of service in TFT is indisputably the best in my entire past restaurant experience and I have been to many fine restaurants. It shows even in small details such as finding your napkin replaced with a fresh new folded napkin when you come back from the toilet. The dishes were plated in exquisite style and the servers presented and described them with great gusto. They were not only reading a memorised script but were able to answer our questions intelligently.
After the broth, we had turşu suyu (pickled vegetable juice) as palate cleanser:
The glasses were served with a pickled strawberry half on the side (not shown above).
The next serving was marrow in the bone topped with Trabzon butter and erzincan honey (shown on the right below) served with sourdough pide, two slices of sudjuk (not shown) and olive oil. I only show below part of the olive oil bowl and the bone marrow topped with butter and honey:
I started with a piece of the bread and the butter and honey from the top of the bone and then dunked my remaining bread in the olive oil and had it with the bone marrow. I could have had more bread but it was probably good that there was not any more. You would not want to stuff yourself. There were more dishes to come.
We shared the chef’s table with a couple from London on our left, a single woman from England on our right and an East European couple at the far end. To them, the servers described the dishes in English and I thought their command of the language was excellent.
The next dish was imitation stuffed mussel. The stuffed mussel is a popular Istanbul street food. The following for example is the photo of a street vendor from Özlem Warren’s web site:
In TFT version, called the TT stuffed mussel, they do use the meat of fresh mussels but discard the shells. The TT stuffed mussel shells are made by drying Japanese kelp seaweed (kombu) and brewing it with anchovies. They shape the dried kombu like mussel shells and use the juice (dashi) to flavour the stuffing, which is otherwise prepared like one does traditional mussel stuffing. The finished product is served on a bed of small rocks as you see below. There was one piece each and is eaten as a whole in one or two bites:
After eating the TT stuffed mussel, I went to the toilet and on the way back stayed in the hall for a while enjoying the city landscape. The waiter came out and urged me in because the Chef wanted us to eat the next dish while it was still hot:
The egg yolk was hot, the so-called bitter weeds (hardly visible because they are buried under dried Ezine cheese) were icy cold. I am not sure what the oily sauce was. We were told to eat it without mixing it too much so that we could taste the different ingredients individually. It was an interesting dish.
The next was a TT-style sashimi. It is made from Orkinos caught near Izmir:
Orkinos is a kind of Tuna fish. For your information, the following from the press is the photo of a 403-kg orkinos caught in Agean Sea:
The TT sashimi is served on a bed of grilled eggplant. I thought it probably needed a bit more peppery or umami seasoning; otherwise, the fish was very tender and a pleasure to eat.
We then had one Urla artichoke opened up like a flower and topped with pistachio and caviar. We had been watching the cook Ilayda preparing this dish the whole night in front us (remember we were sitting at the Chef’s Table):
For an ordinary artichoke you buy from Coles, the petals are generally inedible and they are peeled away and discarded. The petals of these special artichokes from Urla were very tender. We were told they were available only for a brief season of the year. Here is what it looked like on my plate. It looked better before I touched it with my spoon (before I remembered to take a photo):
The next dish was Kalkan fish (a type of Turbo caught in Black Sea) served with sheep belly (kuzu göbeği) mushrooms and pastırma (curried meat):
Kalkan is generally a savoury fish and is expensive. This rendition did justice to it. The bite-size pieces around the plate are kuzugöbeği mushrooms, which I had not had before and they were nice. The sauce not only looked like a Kandinsky painting but also was very flavoursome even when spooned on its own.
Then we had mantı (Turkish ravioli), served as one single piece each. It was a bit too much al dente to my taste. I like mantı well-cooked, almost doughy. The filling though was very juicy (my tartar ancestors would call it ‘sorpalı’).
We are approaching the end now. After mantı, we each had a lamb cutlet served on the side with tempura green pepper (called kıl biber which is a Turkish specialty that I could not find in Australia):
The lamb was served with a sauce prepared with kokorech spices (kokorech is Turkish street food made from sheep intestines and lots of herbs and spices). With this serving, we were asked to pick a knife from a selection of five. Mine (shown above) had its handle made of Akchaabat (Turkish maple tree). Meliz picked one with an olive tree handle. Offering knife choices was an interesting touch. The lamb was cooked rare. It was OK for me but was probably too rare for Meliz. The tempura pepper was very good but at this time in the evening I was so full that I could not eat the batter. I took the pepper out of its yellow-red batter crust before eating. It tasted like grilled green pepper.
The last dish we were served at our seats was the dessert, AI kataifi with sour cherry. The AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. We were told that the Chef gave chose his ingredients and input them to an LLM (Large Language Model like ChatGPT) or software that served as an LLM front end (the waiter did not know which one) and ask the LLM to come up with a dessert recipe. This was the result:
I know I have already used this adjective too many times in this review but this one was really interesting. The bread was pudding bread steamed and baked and dried. It was extremely porous and fragile. I do not remember what the base was but it had completely different texture and taste and provided a nice contrast. The whole plate was supercooled ice. The topping was cream and sour cherry preserves. I loved it.
After our dinner, we were given a tour of the full kitchen. As we start the tour, we were given two glasses of sweet liquor,
followed by a TT special lokum:
and then a cone of ice cream each to lick during the kitchen tour:
This is where washing and chopping are done:
The dried fish carcasses and fishheads are remnants of past cooking and kept here for decoration only. Here is another look of the kitchen front:
Including the prepayment of 9000 TRY during reservation, it cost us a total of 23000 TRY (A$1150 or A$575 per person). This is expensive dinner in Australia and a very expensive dinner in Istanbul. Both Meliz and I think that it was worth it.
I thought the cost was justified. It is not only the cost of the food but the cost of providing a whole eating experience, which is possible only with many staff, all of whom have to get their paychecks out of what we pay for our dinner. Looking around while sitting at our table, Meliz and I estimated the number of cooks and waiters and waitresses to be at around 30. We then learned that the total staff is 27 (15 kitchen + 12 service) with another 7 described as ‘craftsmen’.
Degustation restaurants are fragile species. I have known many eateries offering degustation menus in Brisbane that have come and gone, although some of them were pretty good. While the degustation experience is interesting the first time, it tends to get stale with repetition because the style remains the same even when the menu changes. As I noted at the beginning, most of the customers at TTF were foreign visitors. Tourists probably would keep coming as long as TTF maintains its Michelin star status:
I sincerely am hoping that Chef Fatih Tutak will be able to keep the restaurant open and will make it flourish. We would like to come again with Taylan and Yi, both of whom are self-styled foodies and I am sure would enjoy the experience.
Finally, here is the Chef Fatih Tutak (on the right) inspecting a dish before it was served.
He kept doing this through the night. I suppose you do not get to be a Michelin-star Chef two years in a row (and hopefully for many more years to go) unless you are willing and able to constantly keep watching what goes on in your kitchen and what comes out of it.
How to get there?
The TFT is in the Now Bomonti building, on the corner of Silahşör and Yeniyol streets. It is 2 kilometers from our Beşiktaş Home horizontally, and 120 m vertically. Our booking was for 7:30 pm. We could not find a taxi and we took the bus. The DT2 bus travelled from Akaretler to Osmanbey in twenty minutes and it took us 10 minutes to walk from Osmanbey to the restaurant.
Seems like you had a short visit to heaven and came back