Food & Drink

Turkish winters can be surprisingly cold, especially in Istanbul, Ankara, and the Anatolian heartland.

If you spend any time in a Turkish city, you will notice glass-fronted shops filled with colorful cakes, cookies, and pastries. These are pastanes, the pastry shops that sit at the heart of Turkish social life.

When most travelers picture Turkish sweets, one name comes to mind: baklava. It is delicious, of course, but it represents only a fraction of the country’s dessert culture.

For six centuries, the Ottoman Empire ruled a vast territory from the Balkans to Arabia, and its kitchens ruled the region’s tables.

Ask a Turk about the national cuisine, and you will get a gentle correction: there is no single Turkish food, but seven regional kitchens, each with its own climate, its own ingredients, and its own pride.

Turkish cooking is defined by the seasons. The country’s markets, kitchens, and tables all follow the rhythm of the harvest, and the tomato of August is a different thing from the tomato of April.

In the markets of Turkey, you will see them piled in great stacks: the blocks of olive oil soap, pale green and grey, stamped with the maker’s mark and smelling of the Mediterranean.

Turkey has been making wine for thousands of years, and two regions stand out as the heart of its modern wine country: Thrace in the northwest and Cappadocia in central Anatolia.

The Anatolian Plateau is the heart of Turkey, the vast, high tableland that fills the center of the country and shapes its climate, its history, and its character.

Turkey is a geography lesson in a single country.

Istanbul has brewed coffee for five centuries, and it has just lived through its most exciting coffee decade.

Turkey has one of the world’s oldest coffee cultures, and now it has one of its newest.