9 Turkish Mezes to Try (and How Locals Eat Them)

If you only learn one thing about eating in Turkey, make it meze. These small plates are how locals actually start a real meal, and on a good night they become the meal. Below are nine Turkish mezes I’d put in front of any first-timer, plus a quick word on how to order them like you’ve done it before.

Meze are appetizers, but that sells them short. A table of cold and hot meze, torn bread, and a glass of something cold is one of the great low-key pleasures of this country. Get the mix right and you won’t need a main course at all.

What is meze, really?

Meze are shareable small dishes, mostly cold to start, then a round of hot ones. In a meyhane (the traditional Istanbul tavern), a waiter often arrives with a tray of cold plates so you can point at what you want. You build the table yourself. Salads, dips, beans in olive oil, grilled vegetables, fish roe spread, the lot.

The whole ritual usually runs alongside rakı, the anise spirit that turns cloudy white when you add water (locals call it “aslan sütü”, lion’s milk). You sip it slowly, never as a shot, and the meal stretches past two hours without anyone checking a watch. If you’re curious about the wider drinking scene, see whether you can drink alcohol in Istanbul and the Turkish drinks worth trying before you sit down.

Now, the nine I’d send you to first.

Carrot salad with yogurt (havuç tarator)

This is the gateway meze. Grated carrot is gently cooked in a little olive oil, then folded into thick Turkish yogurt with garlic. Some cooks add dill, some keep it plain with just a pinch of salt. The result is creamy, faintly sweet, and impossible to stop eating with bread. Confusingly, it’s often called havuç tarator, even though it has nothing to do with the walnut tarator further down this list.

If salads are your thing, the broader world of Turkish salads runs well beyond the lettuce-and-tomato you might expect.

Çiğ köfte (and why it’s usually meatless now)

Çiğ köfte literally means “raw meatballs”, and that’s exactly what it once was: raw lamb or beef kneaded for the best part of an hour with fine bulgur and a long list of spices. Here’s the part most visitors don’t know. Back in 2008 the Turkish authorities banned the commercial sale of the raw-meat version over food-safety concerns, and that ban still stands in 2026. So the çiğ köfte you’ll buy from a shop today is the bulgur-based, spice-heavy, completely vegan version, usually bound with walnuts and tomato paste rather than meat.

You’ll find çiğ köfte wrapped in a lettuce leaf or a thin lavash with pomegranate molasses, lemon, and fresh herbs. Spicy, tangy, and weirdly addictive. It also happens to be one of the better vegan-friendly bites on a meze table.

Stuffed mussels (midye dolma)

Less a sit-down meze and more a street institution, midye dolma is the snack you eat standing up near the water. Mussels are stuffed with spiced rice (cinnamon, black pepper, currants, sometimes pine nuts), steamed, and sold from chilled trays. The vendor pops the shell open, you squeeze over the lemon wedge, scoop, and hand the empty shell back. Repeat until you lose count, because the price is per piece and nobody’s keeping score for you.

You’ll see midye dolma carts thickest around Karaköy, Beşiktaş, and the Kadıköy waterfront, busiest late in the evening. A few quick rules on eating from carts are in my tips before trying Istanbul street food.

Barbunya (Turkish-style kidney beans)

Barbunya pilaki is cranberry beans simmered slowly with tomato, carrot, onion, and a generous pour of olive oil, then served cold or at room temperature with a squeeze of lemon. It’s humble, filling, and exactly the kind of thing a Turkish grandmother makes a pot of on Sunday. On a meze table it’s the steady, savory anchor that balances all the garlicky yogurt around it.

Turkish şakşuka (not the one you’re thinking of)

Forget the North African eggs-in-tomato dish. Turkish şakşuka is a cold meze of fried eggplant and peppers in a light garlic-tomato sauce, often with a spoon of yogurt on top. Eggplant does a lot of heavy lifting in this cuisine, and şakşuka is one of its best showings. If you fall for it, the rest of the Turkish eggplant dishes are a rabbit hole worth falling into.

Fried Black Sea anchovies (hamsi tava)

Up on the Black Sea coast, the little anchovy called hamsi is practically a religion. Dredged in cornmeal and fried until crisp, hamsi tava arrives as a hot meze you eat whole, bones and all, with lemon and raw onion. It’s salty, crunchy, and tastes of the sea. Order it in a proper fish meyhane and you’re eating the way coastal Turks have for generations. For the full sit-down version, my guide to the best fish and meze restaurants in Istanbul points you to the right tables.

Cacık (cool, fresh, light)

When the table gets heavy and garlicky, cacık is the reset button. It’s thinned Turkish yogurt with shredded cucumber, garlic, olive oil, dried mint, and a little salt, somewhere between a dip and a cold soup. Foreigners often clock it as tzatziki’s Turkish cousin, and they’re not wrong, though cacık is usually looser and more spoonable. On a hot Istanbul evening it’s the most refreshing thing on the table.

Tarator (the walnut one)

Here’s where the name finally makes sense. Proper tarator is a walnut-and-garlic sauce thickened with day-old bread, lemon, and olive oil, ground into a rich, nutty paste. It’s the classic partner for fried mussels, calamari, or grilled fish, so you’ll usually meet it on a seafood-leaning table. Creamy, sharp with garlic, and very different from the yogurt carrot salad that borrows its name.

Baba ganoush (smoky eggplant again)

Eggplant’s victory lap. Baba ganoush is char-grilled eggplant whipped with tahini, garlic, lemon, and olive oil into a smoky, silky dip. The smokiness is the whole point, so it’s best when the eggplant has been blackened over a real flame rather than baked. Scoop it with warm bread and it disappears fast. A close Turkish relative, patlıcan salatası, swaps the tahini for a more rustic mash of eggplant, peppers, and parsley, so try both and pick a side.

How to build a meze table

The unwritten order goes like this. Start with cold meze (cacık, şakşuka, barbunya, the carrot salad), let them sit while you talk, then bring on the hot ones (sigara böreği, hamsi tava) once the first round is half gone. Order fewer than you think you need, because you can always wave the waiter back, and an over-ordered table just goes cold.

Two or three cold plates, one or two hot, bread, and a drink is plenty for two people as a light meal. Double it and you’ve got a feast for four. This is the same logic behind a good Turkish soup course or a slow Sunday breakfast: small things, shared, no rush.

That’s my short list of Turkish mezes to try. Get the cacık, çiğ köfte, midye dolma, and a smoky eggplant on the same table and you’ve already eaten better than most tourists who only chase kebabs. Order a little, sit a while, and let the table fill up around you. That’s the whole secret.