For the table
Maçakızı
Göltürkbükü · Türkiye
On the quiet north shore of the Bodrum peninsula, Maçakızı is less a hotel than a way of spending a Turkish summer: a family beach club that happens to have rooms, where the whole place tilts down the hill towards the water and the table.
Ayla Emiroğlu opened Maçakızı in the 1970s, when Göltürkbükü was a fishing cove and Bodrum had not yet become Bodrum, and the family has kept it ever since. That continuity is the whole point. The rooms climb a bougainvillea-covered hillside in low whitewashed terraces, simple and cool, and almost everyone drifts down past them to the wooden decks that step straight into the Aegean. You swim off the boards, you lunch in your swimsuit, a launch ferries you out to a cove and back. By late afternoon the loungers have turned into the most relaxed kind of theatre, and the crowd, glamorous without trying too hard, is part of what you are paying for.
The kitchen has always been the reason regulars come back, and it now carries a Michelin star under the chef Aret Sahakyan. The cooking is Aegean and confident, built on fish off the local boats and produce from the hotel's own culinary gardens, served on a terrace that looks across the bay to the lights of the far shore. CafeMed runs the daytime, lighter and barefoot. The meze still arrive in a slow procession, and the sunset hour, when the music lifts and the rosé comes out, is the one the place is famous for.
There are grander hotels on this coast and quieter ones, but few with this much character or this strong a sense of where they are. Maçakızı is independent, family-run and entirely itself, a single idea held for half a century. We will be honest about what it is not: this is a scene, busy and social in August, with rooms that are comfortable rather than lavish. Come for the table, the decks and the summer it knows how to throw, and it is one of the most enjoyable addresses in the Aegean.
