Tag: Turkish Coffee

Deep Roots for an Istanbul Delight

Deep Roots for an Istanbul Delight

By SUSANNE FOWLER

Serhat Ozsen
Ozlem Tuna designed this set for serving coffee and Turkish delight, or lokum.

ISTANBUL — Good things often come in small packages: dark Turkish coffee or freshly brewed tea, for example, served in exquisite porcelain cups or etched tulip-shaped glasses, all accompanied by a mere bite or two of lokum, the candy also known as Turkish delight.

In the designer shops of Istanbul, traditional lokum dishes, or lokumluk in Turkish, are getting a modern makeover, though one with roots stretching to the Ottoman, Seljuk and even Hittite eras.

Prices can range from 390 Turkish lira, or about $192, for the designer Ozlem Tuna’s individual platter, miniature lokumluk and demitasse set, to more than to 3,100 lira for a dish in solid silver from the workshops of the upscale design house Armaggan.

“Presentation says a lot here in Turkey,” the designer Irem Bonfil of Dot Design Studio said. “It’s a sort of ceremony, so you have not just the special glass teacups, but other things you need for the table. A lokumluk is part of that.”

The serving of lokum, she said, “is a very old custom that is still used in most houses. You always have a box of lokum to put into a special dish in case someone just drops in.”

Whether the sweets are rose-scented lokum from the classic Haci Bekir on Istiklal Caddesi in the heart of the lively Beyoglu district, or rolls of almond paste from Meshur Bebek Badem Ezmesi along the Bosporus, they are presented in containers of silver, gold plate or fine ceramic decorated with accents like turquoise stones or a tulip-shaped finial.

“When I got married, I received one as a wedding gift from my mother-in-law,” Ms. Bonfil said. “It’s an important item that you receive as a young girl, and you keep it.”

Many of the lokumluk that she and others are creating are made by hand, from natural materials, by master craftsmen in the workshops that stretch from the Egyptian spice market up the hill to the Grand Bazaar.

“I had been an interior designer since 1986 for more commercial projects like large hotels and hospitals in the Middle East and Central Asia,” said Ms. Bonfil, who studied costume and stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. “But I wanted to come closer to local people and the source. I like to work with the craftsmen. They tell me their abilities and I design new things for them to make. It’s actually a dialog between them and me.”

Her newest line will be available, starting this month, at the Beymen department store at the new Zorlu Center Mall in Istanbul. Items include substantial plates carved from blocks of white or dark gray Turkish marble, with a small hand-hammered antique or silver-plated brass, crescent-moon-topped lokumluk as a centerpiece.

Perhaps her most interesting lokumluk reflects Ms. Bonfil’s own multicultural background.

“My mom is Levantine — half-Italian half-Hungarian — my dad is Turkish with some drops of Greek blood,” she said, “whereas my husband is a Sephardic Jew. I find myself immersed in all of these different traditions and I love it.”

That love is embodied in a 24-karat gold-plated hammered oxidized brass platter, 32 centimeters, or 12.6 inches, wide. The decorative top is a dreidel, or spinning top, crafted by Afghan Jews, she said. Some of the dreidels are engraved with Hebrew lettering. The silver and gold leaf veneer is circled with small agates and an accent bead is built from tiny pieces of turquoise. It sells for about 1,500 lira.

“I work with craftsmen whose work may be extinct soon,” she said. “There are only a few people that work on copper and brass the way you can see on my objects.”

Keeping crafts alive is also a goal of Ms. Tuna, who has a bachelor’s degree in ceramics from Marmara University.

“I work mostly with the traditional craftsmen around the Grand Bazaar,” she said. “I really care about using local products. All of my things are produced in Istanbul by hand in small ateliers using methods that haven’t changed since the Ottoman Empire.”

Ms. Tuna’s lokumluk blend old-style manufacturing with contemporary shapes and colors, offering bright turquoise or cherry red ceramics and hammered copper or brass silver-plated saucers, and cup handles with a tiny tulip motif. A set of three gold-plated, hand-beaten copper lokum bowls, called Dun, Bugun, Yarin (Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow), sells for 710 lira.

“For me, it’s very important to keep tradition alive,” she said. And that includes the role of Turkish delight in entertaining.

“Lokum is special,” Ms. Tuna said, “because Turkish coffee has a bitter taste, and we also like to eat sweets. Lokum is small and comes in different flavors. So it’s a perfect team.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 19, 2013, in The International New York Times.

November 19, 2013
Don’t Call It ‘Turkish’ Coffee, Unless, Of Course, It Is

by JOANNA KAKISSIS

Throughout the region that was once the Ottoman empire, people make coffee pretty much the same way: using coffee beans ground into a fine powder, then boiled in a little brass pot that the Turks call a cezve.

maxpax/via Flickr

When I was in Istanbul in March, I stopped by a tiny cafe called Mandabatmaz, near Taksim Square. Ten Bulgarian tourists were inside, waiting for demitasses of rich, strong coffee “so thick even a water buffalo wouldn’t sink in it,” according to a translation of the cafe’s name.

I ordered a cup of the velvety coffee, crowned with a bubbly froth.

“A beautiful Turkish coffee,” said one of the Bulgarian tourists.

Back home in Bulgaria, as well as Slovenia, Hungary, Romania, Iran and Israel, they do call this “beautiful coffee” Turkish. And they make it pretty much the same way: using coffee beans ground into a fine powder, then boiled in a little brass pot that the Turks call a cezve. The coffee is ready when it rises, bubbles and nearly overflows.

The style of coffee, also known as Arabic, first came from Yemen. An Ottoman governor stationed in Yemen in the 16th century fell in love with it and introduced it to Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, who popularized coffee in Istanbul and beyond.

A century later, Sultan Murad IV outlawed coffee, calling it an indecent drink, and chopped off the heads of those who drank it. The coffee, obviously, won out.

But ordering Turkish coffee today doesn’t go over well in some Balkan or eastern Mediterranean countries that were once part of the Ottoman Empire — even if their preparation of the coffee is remarkably similar.

In Armenia, where the Ottomans led a genocide against more than a million people between 1915 and 1923, it’s Armenian coffee. In Sarajevo, Bosnia, I once ordered a “Turkish coffee” only to be corrected by the irritated waiter: “You mean aBosanska kafa” — a Bosnian coffee. In Cyprus, which the Turks invaded in 1974, it’s a kypriakos kafes — Cypriot coffee. (Except in the northern third of the island, which Turkey has occupied since 1974.)

In Greece, where I live and which has a tortured history with Turkey, you order anelliniko — a Greek coffee.

“It wasn’t always this way,” says Albert Arouh, a Greek food scholar who writes under a pen name, Epicurus. “When I was a kid in the 1960s, everyone in Greece called it Turkish coffee.”

Arouh says he began noticing a name change after 1974, when the Greek military junta pushed for a coup in Cyprus that provoked Turkey to invade the island.

“The invasion sparked a lot of nationalism and anti-Turkish feelings,” he says. “Some people tried to erase the Turks entirely from the coffee’s history, and re-baptized it Greek coffee. Some even took to calling it Byzantine coffee, even though it was introduced to this part of the world in the sixteenth century, long after the Byzantine Empire’s demise.”

By the 1980s, Arouh noticed it was no longer politically correct to order a “Turkish coffee” in Greek cafes. By the early 1990s, Greek coffee companies like Bravo (now owned by DE Master Blenders 1753 of the Netherlands) were producingcommercials of sea, sun and nostalgic village scenes and declaring “in the most beautiful country in the world, we drink Greek coffee.”

Nationalism was one reason for the change, says Marianthi Milona, a Greek cookbook writer who grew up in Cologne, Germany. “But it was also a way to differentiate from other kinds of coffee.”

In the first half of the 20th century, the only coffee in Greece was “Turkish” coffee. Then came frappe, the iced drink made from instant Nescafe. Then espresso and cappuccino, which are now the hottest items in most Greek cafes. “So the ‘coffee’ — the first coffee — had to have a name too,” she said. “And because we are in Greece, we decided it must be Greek.”

In Athens, my uncle Thanassis, who has been making this coffee for more than 60 years, waits until the water in the pot is warm before adding the powdery grounds. He stirs the mixture until it looks creamy. In Istanbul, I noticed the man making the coffee at Mandabatmaz adding a few drops of hot water to spoonfuls of coffee and sugar, then whip-stirring the mixture into a dark paste. He then added more hot water to the pot before boiling it to velvety perfection over a gas flame.

My uncle and I tried the Mandabatmaz method at his house in Athens, with Turkish coffee I’d brought him as a gift from a market in Kadıköy on the Asian side of Istanbul. The coffee was stronger than the Loumidis brand my uncle usually buys but he agreed that it tasted great.

“To Suleiman the Magnificent,” he said, holding up his demitasse in a toast. “Thanks for the coffee.”

May 3, 2013
Real Turkish Coffee in Istanbul

Two young men stood about 15 feet apart on a sunny narrow street in the Kadikoy market, chafing in their brown lab coats. The one tending to a handful of white marble tables barked “buyrun!” (roughly, “come and get it!”) at passersby, the other quietly wiped down seven or eight black marble tables.

The black tables – the ones in front of the veteran Fazil Bey Kahvesi – used to be white until they were replaced when a gaggle of upstart neighboring cafes put out their own white tables, presumably hoping to siphon off some of Fazil Bey’s business. Next door is Yavuz Bey and next to that Hurrem Efendi and just across the street Niyazi Bey, all serving Turkish coffee and seating customers at the same white marble tables. Buyrun!

In Istanbul, fads burn white hot and competition can be comically ruthless. Be it coffee or mojitos, you’ll see butcher shops, bookstores and pharmacies retrofitted overnight to capitalize on the latest popular trend. We even know one (now former) barber, Suleyman, who recently hung up his shears, donned a fez and turned his barbershop into place to squeeze and sell fruit juice.

We’re all for free enterprise and open competition, but the mushrooming of cafes on Fazil Bey’s street sets up a dangerous trap that many of us could fall into. Turkish coffee is Turkish coffee and the tables are all natural stone anyway, a visitor to this stretch of Kadikoy might think, so what could be the big difference?

There’s only one way to find out. Patiently wait for one of those black-topped tables to open and order yourself an orta sekerli (medium sweet) and you will experience what it means to sip a truly superior coffee. At Fazil Bey, they roast their own Brazilian beans to a preferred (dark) color on the premises and grind them throughout the day into a fine powder, as Turkish coffee requires. Before even taking down the copper cezve to make a cup of coffee, Fazil Bey already has a leg up on most of the competition, who buy their coffee pre-ground from distributors.

Freshness is a big factor but the in-house roasting is a tradition that goes back to the shop’s foundation in the 1920’s. According to Murat Celik, Fazil Bey’s roaster of thirty years, respect for this shop’s tradition is an important ingredient in a good cup. “Around here, you’ve got taxi drivers and kokorec vendors who quit that job and start making coffee,” he scoffed. “This is our grandfather’s profession.”

At Fazil Bey we do believe the coffee is superior, but it’s the ritualistic experience here that we really enjoy. The tiny shop itself is like a sanctuary, with every nook and cranny filled with something precious and coffee-related. The intoxicating smell of fresh ground coffee wafts around the room like incense. Every detail of the service – the small metal service trays, the porcelain coffee cups with the Fazil Bey logo, small glasses of water and the square of lokum served alongside – adds up to one powerful cup of coffee. Sipping a coffee here, you can feel their respect for the coffee-making tradition and the generations that upheld it in this shop. That’s something that can’t be imitated with furniture.

Address: Serasker Caddesi 1A, Kadikoy

Telephone: +902164502870

(photo by Ansel Mullins)

via Real Turkish Coffee in Istanbul | Istanbul Eats.

May 19, 2012