8 Turkish Foods for Dinner Worth Cooking Tonight

If you want a quick answer, here are eight Turkish foods that work beautifully for dinner: a hot soup to start, then karnıyarık, mantı, börek, chicken sauté, ali nazik, sarma and dolma, and a pot of kuru fasulye. Some are vegetarian, some lean heavily on meat, and most reheat well the next day. I cook a rotation of these at home, and I have eaten every one of them in Istanbul lokantas dozens of times, so below I will tell you what each dish actually is, how it gets served, and where to go if you would rather have someone else do the cooking.

Turkish cuisine leans on a small pantry done well: eggplant, yogurt, ground lamb or beef, tomato paste, onions, good olive oil. Once you understand a few of these dishes, the rest of the food culture of Istanbul opens up fast.

What soup should I start a Turkish dinner with?

Start with soup, because a Turkish table almost always does. The safe, reliable opener is mercimek çorbası, the red lentil soup you will find on every menu in the country, usually with a wedge of lemon to squeeze over it. Ezogelin, a slightly heartier red-lentil and bulgur soup, is the other one I reach for on a cold night.

If you are feeling braver, there is işkembe (tripe soup), the famous late-night cure for a long evening out, served with garlic, vinegar, and chili on the side so you can dial it up yourself. I have written a longer guide to the best Turkish soups to try if you want to go deeper, because there are easily a dozen worth knowing.

Karnıyarık

Karnıyarık is the dish I cook most often, and it is genuinely impressive for how little it asks of you. The name means “split belly,” which is exactly what it looks like: eggplants slit down the middle and stuffed with a mixture of ground beef or lamb, onion, garlic, tomato, and green pepper, then baked until the eggplant goes soft and the filling sets.

Serve it the proper way, with buttery rice pilaf on the side and a spoonful of cold yogurt or cacık (the cucumber-yogurt dip). The contrast of the warm smoky eggplant against the cool yogurt is the whole point. If you want to actually make it, I keep a step-by-step karnıyarık recipe that walks through the frying-versus-baking choice for the eggplant.

Mantı

Mantı are tiny Turkish dumplings, and the gold standard comes from Kayseri in central Anatolia. The rule there is that the smaller the dumpling, the more skill (and love) went into it, and the best ones are small enough to fit forty on a spoon. Each little parcel is filled with spiced minced beef or lamb and onion, boiled, then drowned in garlic yogurt and a spoon of butter sizzled with red pepper and dried mint.

This is not a fast weeknight dish if you make the dough by hand, so in most Istanbul households mantı is a weekend or special-occasion food, often folded by several people around one table. The good news for visitors: plenty of restaurants do it well, and it shows up on most lists of the country’s most famous foods for good reason.

Börek

Börek is the broad family of savory pastries built from yufka (thin phyllo sheets), and there is a version for every mood. The fillings are usually cheese, spinach, or seasoned meat. The shape is what changes the name: sigara böreği are the crisp cigar-shaped cheese rolls you snack on, su böreği is the soft lasagna-style one where the dough is actually boiled before baking, and kol böreği is the coiled tray version.

Making yufka from scratch is the hard part, so be honest with yourself and buy ready-made sheets the first few times. If you would rather eat it than make it, a good börekçi at breakfast is one of the quiet joys of the city, and a slice with tea makes a fine light dinner too.

Chicken sauté (tavuk sote)

Tavuk sote is the easiest dish on this list and the one I would teach a beginner first. You sauté cubed chicken breast with onion, green pepper, tomato or tomato paste, a little garlic, and a handful of spices, and that is basically it. Twenty minutes, one pan, dinner.

It is forgiving, so it is a good place to start if you are new to Turkish flavors. From there it is a short hop to the rest of the country’s chicken dishes, which range from grilled skewers to slow-cooked stews.

Ali nazik

Ali nazik is a Gaziantep specialty, and it might be my favorite eggplant dish in all of Turkish cooking. It comes together in two layers: a base of smoky char-grilled eggplant whipped with garlicky strained yogurt, and on top of that a warm spoonful of seasoned lamb or beef, often finished with butter and chili. The smoke from the eggplant doing the work against the cool tang of the yogurt is what makes it special.

The name supposedly traces back to an Ottoman sultan tasting it in Antep and asking whose “gentle hand” (eli nazik) had made it. True or not, it is a great story to tell over dinner, and the dish belongs on any honest list of Turkish eggplant dishes. Serve it with pilaf and grilled vegetables.

Sarma and dolma

Sarma and dolma are two sides of the same idea: sarma means “wrapped” and dolma means “stuffed.” Sarma is the rolled one, classically vine (grape) leaves or white cabbage wrapped around a filling. Dolma is the stuffed one, where you hollow out bell peppers, tomatoes, dried eggplant, even quince, and pack them with the mix.

There are two broad styles, and it matters for dinner planning. The olive-oil version (zeytinyağlı), filled with rice, pine nuts, and currants, is served cold and is fully vegetarian. The meat version is served warm with yogurt. I have a detailed sarma recipe if you want to try the rolling technique, which is the only fiddly part.

Kuru fasulye (Turkish white beans)

Kuru fasulye is a tomato-and-pepper white bean stew that some Turks only half-jokingly call the national dish. It is the backbone of the esnaf lokantası (the workers’ steam-table restaurants), and you will see a pot of it in practically every one of them. The classic combination on the plate is kuru fasulye, rice pilaf, and a side of pickles, sometimes with a glass of ayran.

There is a vegetarian version and a meat version (etli kuru fasulye), and both are completely traditional, so this is a great dish whether or not you eat meat. To taste the real thing, head to an old-school lokanta like Kanaat in Üsküdar, which has been serving home-style Turkish cooking since 1933, or any tradesman restaurant where the day’s pots sit out on a steam counter. It is some of the best budget food in Istanbul, and it is honest, filling cooking.

Which Turkish dinner should I cook first?

If you are choosing tonight, my honest advice: cook tavuk sote if you want something on the table in twenty minutes, karnıyarık if you have an hour and want to impress someone, and kuru fasulye if you want a big pot that feeds you for two days. Save mantı for a weekend when you have help and patience.

These eight are only a doorway. Once you are comfortable, work through the wider world of Turkish dishes made with meat and the lighter, yogurt-based plates, and you will quickly have enough of a repertoire to never repeat a dinner in a month. Afiyet olsun.