A rooftop over Beyoğlu
Mikla sits on the roof of a hotel in Beyoğlu, high over the historic peninsula of Istanbul, the Golden Horn and the minarets laid out below. The view is half the meal, and among the best seats in the city.
Mehmet Gürs, its chef-owner, helped redraw what modern Turkish cooking could be, and has spent years mapping the country's own small producers.
Anatolia, with a Nordic hand
Carefully sourced Anatolian produce is cured, grilled and plated with a Scandinavian restraint that Gürs brought from his own background. Precise, rooted and quietly radical, new Anatolian rather than either Ottoman nostalgia or Western pastiche.
Dinner at sunset, as the call to prayer crosses the rooftops, is the way to take it.
New Anatolian, mapped from the country's own producers.
The table that redrew modern Turkish cooking, in the best seat in Istanbul. Come for sunset.
VANE selection. Chosen with a critic's eye and judged independently. It's here because we judged it, not because it paid. This is a researched profile, not yet a first-hand VANE verdict; where we have eaten there, the review says so.
Image: Setting, Beyoğlu from the Galata Tower. Photo: Maurice Flesier, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
