Borders Lines
IT’S 11 A.M. IN GAZIANTEP, a city in southeastern Türkiye, and I’m stunned by the sheer spectacle of our late breakfast. My partner, Barry, and I are at a restaurant called Orkide with our friend Filiz Hösükoğlu, an expert in local culture and food. Around us, guys in trim leather jackets and ladies—some in sparkly black tops, some in flowing hijabs—sip menengiç, a warm drink made from ground wild pistachios.
I circle our table in awe, trying to count and record all the dishes, losing track at three dozen. There are snowy clumps of kaymak (clotted buffalo cream) to be eaten with raw honey from the nearby hills; eggs scrambled with walnuts, fresh tarragon, and tiny roasted green olives; and eggs fried with topaç (beef confit). Copper bowls hold apricots stewed with fresh almonds and tahini the color of deep earth. All dishes seem touched by mint, live fire, and flakes of local red pepper.
“This spread is my homage to our region’s Sunday tradition of potluck family breakfasts,” says Mustafa Özgüler, Orkide’s owner, as a vast platter of katmer arrives. A delicate cousin of the city’s prodigious baklava, katmer is made by wrapping layers of paper-thin pastry around pulverized pistachios with an almost preternatural intensity, and then baking it all to a sugary crunch. “Katmer is a cult, a drug…” Filiz murmurs.
I’d been dreaming about Gaziantep—Türkiye’s sixth-largest city, situated just west of the Euphrates River and north of the Syrian border—since I discovered its flavors in Istanbul two decades ago at Çiya, a celebrated restaurant specializing in southeastern Turkish cuisine. The food at Çiya was vibrant and inventive, wild with fresh herbs, pomegranate molasses, and (sun-dried tomato and pepper pastes). It seemed worlds away from the delicate refinement of Istanbul cooking, and it launched in me a mild obsession with Gaziantep. Still, for years I hesitated to go, always too busy in Istanbul, and anxious perhaps that reality might