Editorial
In-depth guides, local perspectives, and editorial stories on İzmir's food, culture, and neighborhoods.
Rakı and fish is not a meal in İzmir so much as an evening that refuses to end. Along the Kordon and its back streets, the meyhane keeps a slower clock than the rest of Turkey, and the table is the point.
Read storyİzmir's old bazaar is not a place you sit down to eat so much as a place you eat your way through. Its food carries the layers the city is made of — Anatolian, Levantine, and the deep Sephardic seam most guides walk past.
Read storyHalf an hour from the city, the Urla vineyard road has quietly become one of Turkey's most serious eating-and-drinking corridors. It pairs reborn native grapes with open-fire Aegean cooking, and now a Michelin constellation to match.
Read storyAcross the gulf from the postcard Kordon, Karşıyaka and Bostanlı are where İzmir eats when it is being itself. The ferry across is part of the meal, and the seafront here trades spectacle for the kind of place you return to weekly.
Read storyİzmir takes its mornings seriously, and over the past decade a self-taught third-wave scene has grown up to match the city's older ritual of the long breakfast. The result is a coffee culture with roots rather than imported gloss.
Read storySouth and north of the city sit two stretches of coast that move at a deliberately different speed. Seferihisar is Turkey's first Cittaslow town, and from its Sunday market to Foça's harbour kitchens, this is where the Aegean eats closest to the source.
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