Turkish Food to Try: 15 Dishes Worth Crossing Istanbul For

If you only remember one thing before you eat your way through Turkey, make it this: skip the hotel buffet and go where the locals queue. Turkish cuisine is regional, opinionated and built around fresh bread, charcoal and a lot of yogurt. Below are the 15 dishes I tell every visitor to try, plus the actual Istanbul places I’d send you to and rough prices as of mid 2026. Come hungry.

What kebab should you order first?

Order an Adana kebab first, then branch out. “Kebab” covers a whole family of grilled meats, and the differences matter once you start tasting them side by side.

Adana is hand minced lamb pressed onto a wide skewer and grilled over charcoal, spicy and a little oily in the best way. Urfa is its milder cousin, same idea without the chilli heat. Then there is İskender, which is a different beast: thin slices of döner laid over cubes of pita, drowned in tomato sauce and browned butter, with a side of yogurt you are meant to mix in. The original İskender comes from Bursa, but plenty of Istanbul places do it justice.

For a proper Adana or a mixed grill, the kebab houses around Aksaray and Kadıköy rarely disappoint. If you want a full rundown of where to go, I put together a guide to the best kebab restaurants in Istanbul that saves you the trial and error. At the time of writing, a generous Adana portion with bread and salad runs somewhere around 250 to 400 lira at a solid local spot.

Pide

Pide is the boat shaped flatbread people lazily call “Turkish pizza”, though it predates the comparison and tastes nothing like a Margherita. The dough is baked in a wood oven and the fillings change by region and by mood: kıymalı (minced meat), kaşarlı (melted cheese), sucuklu (spicy sausage), or my personal favourite, kuşbaşılı with diced lamb and an egg cracked on top. The Black Sea version, kıymalı pide with a runny egg, is the one I’d start with. It is cheap, filling and deeply satisfying after a long day of walking.

Dolma and sarma

Dolma and sarma get lumped together, and they are close, but the words tell you the difference. Dolma means “stuffed” (peppers, tomatoes, aubergines, even mussels on the street), while sarma means “wrapped”, almost always vine or cabbage leaves rolled around the filling. Both come in two camps: the warm, meaty version served as a main, and the cold, olive oil version with rice, pine nuts and currants that you eat as a meze. The cold ones are everywhere on a good meze table, and they reward a squeeze of lemon. If you fall for them, the Turkish mezes to try list will keep you busy.

Lahmacun

Lahmacun is a wafer thin round of dough spread with a layer of spiced minced meat, herbs and tomato, then blasted in a hot oven until the edges crisp. It is not pizza, no matter what the menu says. You squeeze lemon over it, pile on parsley and a few slices of raw onion, roll it up and eat it with your hands. One is a snack, two is lunch, and at the time of writing a single lahmacun at a neighbourhood ocakbaşı costs roughly 60 to 100 lira. It is one of the great cheap eats of the country.

Is kokoreç worth trying?

Yes, if you are even slightly adventurous, kokoreç is worth it. This is seasoned lamb intestine wrapped around offal, grilled on a spit and then chopped fine with tomato, pepper and a hit of oregano and chilli, served in bread. It sounds confronting and tastes like a rich, herby grilled sausage. Şampiyon Kokoreç in Beşiktaş has been the benchmark for years, and a half portion sits around 200 lira at the time of writing.

Late night is the classic time for it, ideally after a few drinks. It is one of the most beloved entries on any Istanbul street food list, and locals are weirdly competitive about whose neighbourhood does it best.

Baklava

People argue about whether baklava is Turkish, Greek or something older still, and honestly the debate is a waste of good eating time. What matters is the quality: paper thin filo, real butter, a thick seam of Gaziantep pistachio and just enough syrup to bind it without turning it soggy. The gold standard in Istanbul is Karaköy Güllüoğlu, a single famous branch by the water in Karaköy where you order by weight at the counter and eat it warm. Ask for fıstıklı (pistachio) and pair it with a tea or a Turkish coffee to cut the sweetness.

A few pieces won’t break the bank, but a full box makes a serious souvenir. If you want to go deeper on where to buy it, I have a whole piece on the best baklava in Istanbul.

Döner

Mention Turkish food abroad and döner is usually the first word out. Stacked seasoned meat (lamb, beef or chicken) turns on a vertical spit and gets shaved off in thin, crisp edged slices. You can have it in bread as a dürüm wrap, on a plate with rice and grilled vegetables (porsiyon), or piled into half a loaf as an ekmek arası. The thing to understand is that good döner is a daytime food. Places like Karadeniz Döner in Beşiktaş sell out by early afternoon, and once the meat is gone, it is gone. Go for lunch, not dinner.

Lokum

Lokum, or Turkish delight, is the soft, gel like sweet you have probably seen wrapped in powdered sugar. Done well it is fragrant and chewy rather than cloying. Skip the rubbery rose cubes aimed at tourists and look for double roasted (çifte kavrulmuş) lokum studded with pistachio or hazelnut. Historic houses like Hafız Mustafa (founded in 1864) and Ali Muhiddin Hacı Bekir set the standard, and most shops will let you taste before you buy. My honest advice: a small mixed box beats a giant one, because the best flavours are the simple nutty ones.

Mantı

Nearly every culture has a dumpling, and mantı is the Turkish answer: tiny parcels of dough filled with spiced minced meat, boiled and then drowned in garlicky yogurt with a drizzle of melted butter infused with red pepper and dried mint. The smaller the dumplings, the more prized the cook, and the Kayseri style is famously bite sized. It is rich, comforting and genuinely hard to stop eating. For the hand rolled, old school version in Istanbul, the kitchen at Hünkar in Nişantaşı is a reliable bet, and it lands on most serious lists of famous Turkish foods.

Which Turkish soups should you order?

Start with mercimek (red lentil) soup, then get braver. Soup is a national habit here, eaten at breakfast, before a main, or as a hangover cure at 4am.

Mercimek is the gateway: smooth, lemony, served with bread and a wedge of lemon at basically every lokanta in the country. From there, ezogelin adds bulgur and a little heat. The bold move is işkembe (tripe soup) or kelle paça (made from sheep’s head and trotters), both of which Turks swear by after a long night, usually loaded with garlic, vinegar and chilli. They are an acquired taste, but skipping them means skipping a real piece of the culture. If soup is your thing, the Turkish soups to try guide goes well beyond the basics.

Gözleme

Gözleme is the savoury flatbread you see being rolled out and griddled by hand at markets and village style cafes, often by an older woman at a low table. The dough is stretched thin, folded around a filling (white cheese and parsley, spinach, potato, or minced meat), then cooked on a domed iron plate until blistered. It is simple, hot and exactly what you want with a glass of tea on a cool morning. The Saturday and Sunday neighbourhood markets are the best place to catch it fresh, rolled and griddled in front of you for next to nothing.

Stuffed artichoke

For all its grilled meat reputation, Turkish cooking has a deep vegetable tradition, and zeytinyağlı enginar (artichokes braised in olive oil) is one of its quiet stars. The hearts are cooked gently with carrots, potatoes, peas and dill, served cold or at room temperature, and they taste of spring. You’ll see them on meze tables and at home style lokantas in season, roughly late spring into early summer. If you lean plant based, Turkey is far kinder to you than its kebab fame suggests.

Mercimek köftesi (lentil balls)

Mercimek köftesi, or lentil balls, are one of the best things on any meze spread and they happen to be vegan. Red lentils and fine bulgur are cooked down, mixed with sautéed onion, tomato and pepper paste, then shaped by hand into little oval patties. You eat them wrapped in a lettuce leaf with a squeeze of lemon, and a drizzle of pomegranate molasses takes them somewhere special. They turn up at family gatherings, tea parties and meyhane tables alike. Cheap, healthy and weirdly addictive.

Hünkar beğendi

The name means “the sultan liked it”, and the story goes that it was created for an Ottoman ruler. The dish is tender braised lamb served over a silky purée of smoked aubergine enriched with butter, flour and cheese, so the eggplant tastes faintly of the grill. It is the kind of plate that converts people who think they don’t like aubergine. The restaurant Hünkar in Nişantaşı, going since 1950, built much of its name on it, and it remains one of the finest expressions of Ottoman cuisine in Istanbul.

Börek

Börek is the flaky, layered pastry that holds Turkish breakfast together. Thin sheets of yufka are layered with butter and a filling (white cheese and parsley, spinach, minced meat or potato) and baked into trays, then cut into squares or coiled into spirals. The water börek (su böreği) version is almost lasagne soft, while sigara böreği are crisp little cigar shaped rolls. Grab a slice from a börekçi with a glass of tea and you have the classic Istanbul breakfast on the go. It pairs perfectly with the full sit down spread in my Turkish breakfast in Istanbul guide.

A few honest tips before you eat

Tap water is fine for cooking but most people drink bottled, so don’t worry about street food being washed in it. Cash still moves faster than cards at the small spots, though that is changing fast. And portions are generous, so order less than you think and graze across more places. That is the whole point of eating here: a lahmacun on one corner, a soup two streets over, baklava and coffee to finish. Pace yourself and Istanbul will feed you very, very well.