Turk Fatih Tutak - Istanbul
Main dining room with open kitchen
Rating: 15/20
Where: Istanbul, Turkey
When: Dinner for 2 on 20 September 2024
Cost per Person: Tasting menu 9900 TL, Wine pairing 6500 TL
Accolades: 2 Michelin Stars
Why: Technically sophisticated reimagining of classic Turkish cuisine
Turk Fatih Tutak is a modern Turkish restaurant run by chef Fatih Tutak in Istanbul. After spending some formative years in Asia, for example at the three-starred Ryugin in Tokyo, chef Tutak returned to open his eponymous restaurant in his hometown, reinterpreting classical Turkish dishes using modern culinary techniques.
The restaurant's location is not near any of the popular sights of the city, but is still easily reachable by taxi. One of the first things we noticed when approaching the restaurant was its distinctive “TT” logo - it looked surprisingly similar to the one that Pierre Gagnaire uses.
Turk Fatih Tutak served a single tasting menu, and the website explained that its expected 200 minute duration could not be sped up since the staff wanted to serve all dishes in their best possible condition. We were also informed by a WhatsApp message the day before our reservation “not to overindulge during the day and to stay away from street food”. This was definitely a first for me - no restaurant ever found it necessary to tell me to show up hungry...
A wine pairing for 6500 TL and a non-alcoholic pairing for 2900 TL were offered with our dinner. All wines were from Turkey, except for a single Japanese sake. The wines were decent in general, with the sparkling wine at the beginning being particularly good. But the price of the pairing still felt a bit steep for what we got. Maybe ordering a bottle might have been a more sensible choice. In fact, several tables around us did just that.
Our dinner started in a lounge called “the courtyard”, the first room that we entered after walking down a long corridor from the restaurant's entrance. A chef behind a bar prepared the first four courses of our meal. This room held maybe half as many tables as the main dining room, which explains why the dinner reservation times were staggered. With our 7:30pm reservation, we were somewhere in the middle of the pack. Since the wine pairing only started in the main dining room, ordering an aperitif wasn't a bad idea.
After sitting down, we noted the total lack of windows in the room - the focus here was clearly on the food. And guests seemed to have come from afar for it, we saw couples from the US, UK, and Japan, and in fact didn't hear any Turkish spoken near us.
Our dinner started with a palate cleanser. (Arguably unnecessary if one had followed the restaurant's instructions to abstain from food for the day.) Pickle juice contained fermented vegetables and sorrel and was served with a sour cherry and a lacto-fermented green strawberry. The juice was - as expected - very sour, the cherry pretty sweet and the strawberry tart and acidic. Hard to rate - if one didn't mind the acidity, maybe a 15.
The next dish looked like a mussel, but its shell was a black edible cracker that was stuffed with, yes, mussels and some spiced rice. This was the restaurant's version of a dolma. The dish tasted earthy, with maybe a hint of paprika, and the mussels were a bit chewy. Pleasant enough 15.
A ball of dry aged beef was stuffed with bulghur and topped with a dollop of osetra caviar. This dish contained quite a large amount of beef, maybe a bit too much - it almost overpowered the other ingredients. Thankfully there were some spices, and little crackers to add some welcome texture. The dish was served surprisingly cold, almost at a fridge temperature. Fine, but there was some unrealized potential here 15.
The final dish served in the lounge was a chicken soup. It contained some croutons and was flavored with yuzu oil, black pepper and chives. The croutons were crunchy and strongly chicken-flavored, while the soup itself was very peppery, earthy and decently flavorful 16. My dining companion (my sister) declared this soup to be “totally delicious” and would have given it a 18.
At this point we were led into the main dining room, which contained maybe a dozen tables,. Most of them were two-tops, but there were a handful of larger tables as well. The room was long and narrow, with the open kitchen and six counter seats taking up the far end of the room. The left side was lined by a not-too-busy bar.
Our first dish in the new room came with the first glass of our wine pairing. It was loosely based on a classic Turkish dish called menemen. This version featured an egg yolk that had been slow-cooked at 64 degrees Celsius with chicken fat. It came with some crumbles, morel mushrooms, and a 6-year-aged cheese that had been pulverized using nitrogen. For the uninitiated in Turkish cuisine (like me), this tasted vaguely like a cheese omelet, with some crunchiness, fruity tomatoes, flavorful morels and a nice, light cheesy taste. Unfortunately, not having tried the original, I don't know how close this was to a “real” menemen 15.
The following bread course consisted of a sourdough pide bread, an olive oil from the restaurant's own garden seasoned with sea salt, a butter topped with a honeycomb, and a Turkish fermented sausage. The bread was served very hot, as in “it will burn your fingers” hot. It was pretty flavor-neutral, but that made it a great partner for the provided toppings. The olive oil was very fragrant, the butter pretty sweet thanks to the honey on top, and the sausage was lovely - flavorful and meaty 15.
The next course was clearly inspired by the chef's time in Japan, and was correspondingly paired with a glass of Japanese sake. Slices of two different cuts of Mediterranean tuna (akami and chutoro) were draped over pieces of smoked eggplant, and seasoned with a tiny bit of wasabi and a sauce made from bergamot and cherry leaf oil. The tuna was fine, not mind-blowing, with the chutoro feeling a tiny bit stringy. But its taste was secondary to the eggplant, which was indeed very smoky - the wasabi got lost entirely in the mix. This might have looked like a Japanese dish at first, but thanks to the eggplant, it really wasn't. Admittedly, I wasn’t totally sure what to make of it 15.
Next, a dish whose looks were reminiscent of the earlier beef ball appetizer. On a base of clotted cream (kaymak) we found some chopped tomatoes, a ball of imperial osetra caviar, fig candy and fig leaf oil. The clotted cream made this dish creamy, the caviar made it salty, and the tomatoes were both sweet and tart. All together a pretty nice combination 16.
A squid shish kebab was topped with sliced porcini mushrooms and pickled caper leaves, and surrounded by a sauce made with porcini mushrooms and sujuk (a Turkish sausage). Interestingly, the nicely cooked squid and the mushrooms had a similar, meaty texture. And they both went well with the sauce. What this dish needed, though, was a little bit more salt - there were great flavors here, but their intensity was dialed way too low. Both the sauce and the mushrooms could have used more of a kick 15. This dish was paired with two wines, a white wine and a light red wine - something that I’ve seen happen more and more recently. Both wines went reasonably well with the dish, but neither was particularly exciting by itself.
No self-respecting Turkish meal can be complete without a lamb course. A one-week-dry-aged lamb chop was topped with a “chip” made from lamb ribs and served with a sauce made from lamb jus, cumin and peppers. Next to it was a tempura-fried pepper drizzled with yogurt and freeze-dried tomato powder. The lamb chop was decent, but the little bit of rib was actually much more flavorful, more earthy, and possibly even a tiny bit gamey. The peppery sauce was nice enough, however the tempura’ed pepper didn't taste of much - it didn’t add anything to the dish 16.
Our final savory dish was a Turkish dumpling, a mante, filled with ground beef from a young cow. It was served with a sauce containing smoked tomatoes, mint and what looked like chili oil. A lovely dish with a juicy filling and a nice dough. Each bite was creamy from the sauce and had a hint of spice from the chili oil. I would have happily eaten many more of these 17.
There are two ways to describe the following main dessert. One is by its ingredients: rose ice cream, caramel-infused bread, white chocolate made fluffy with liquid nitrogen, clotted cream, a freeze-dried cherry and a sour cherry reduction drizzled on top, all served on a ice plate. These are elements of a classic Turkish dessert called kadayif, and the result was sweet, crunchy and fruity - a nice combination. The only irritant was the disc of chilled clotted cream - it literally felt like a lump of fat in an otherwise light dish. A very different way to describe this course is by its genesis: it was created by the chef using ChatGPT. It's no surprise that ChatGPT can be used to generate recipes given the right prompting, but this was the first time that I've eaten one in a restaurant. Well, at least as far as anyone has been willing to admit 16.
At this point, we were taken on a quick tour of the kitchen that included several bites at the dessert station. This intermezzo must be the reason why the kitchen is so unwilling to speed up (or slow down) the course progression - getting a dozen tables into the kitchen one after another needs some careful time management. First, we were served a sour cherry liquor, which was sweet and tart at the same time. Nice 16. A second kaymak dish, this one sweet, had pistachios on top. It tasted deep fried and cheesy, similar to a donut 15.
A Turkish delight with lemon zest felt like a combination of marshmallows and lemons 14. Finally, we received an ice cream cone to take back to our table. Two flavors, tonka bean and nectarine, came with optional toppings: almonds, puffed rice and a chocolate sauce. I tried the nectarine ice cream with almonds, but sadly it didn't taste of nectarines, in fact, it wasn't even fruity 13.
Back in the dining room, we were treated to a display of fruits: grapes, nectarines, figs, melons, etc. Fine, but not mind-blowing. Unfortunately, our napkins had disappeared during the kitchen trip, making this messier to eat than necessary 14.
Overall: A meal full of technically complex riffs on traditional Turkish dishes. While I liked our dinner, I wasn't blown away by most of the dishes. Possibly that's because I'm not in the target audience - ideally a diner would be familiar with the original Turkish dishes that were being referenced, in order to fully appreciate their new versions. Without that knowledge, the dishes often fell into a “fine, but so what?” category. So maybe it's no accident that the dish I liked the best (the mante), was an excellent, straightforward rendition of a typical Turkish dish, without any overt culinary magic. By way of comparison, I had a better time at one-starred Neolokal a few days earlier - less sophisticated technically, but with more straightforward (and tasty) renderings of Turkish culinary classics 15.
