RFK Cuisine · Turkish · Istanbul
Best Turkish Restaurants in Istanbul 2026
Turkish · Istanbul · 7 rooms ranked · Updated June 2026
Compiled by the Restaurants for Kings editorial team · Published June 20, 2026 · Updated June 20, 2026
Fatih Tutak came home to Istanbul in 2019 after a decade cooking across Asia, and within three years his restaurant held two Michelin stars — the first in Turkiye, and the proof that Turkish cooking had a fine-dining ceiling no one had reached before. That is the headline of a much older story. This is a city that fed an empire, where Ottoman palace kitchens, the regional traditions of a vast Anatolia, and the meyhane (raki-and-meze tavern) all still run alongside the new starred rooms. The result is a range no other city quite matches: a two-star tasting menu and a 1912 kebab house, an Ottoman recipe revival and a Green-Star Anatolian kitchen, all in the same week. Ranked below are the seven that show Turkish food at its best, with the chef, the signature and the dish to order at each.
1.TURK Fatih Tutak
Turkiye's only two-star room and the best meal in the country; book it weeks out for Anatolian cooking remade at the highest level.
TURK Fatih Tutak, in the Bomonti district of Sisli, is the only two-Michelin-star restaurant in Turkiye, and the meal that proved Turkish cooking could compete at the very top. Fatih Tutak spent a decade in the kitchens of Asia before coming home in 2019, and he brought that technique to bear on his own heritage: a long tasting menu that takes Anatolian dishes — a regional dumpling, a fermented grain, a dry-aged meat — and rebuilds them with precision and modern method while keeping the original legible on the plate. The room is dark and serious, the service among the best in the city. The tasting menu sits at the top of this list, roughly the equivalent of two hundred euros. Book several weeks ahead for a weekend table. This is the meal to build an Istanbul trip around.
Reserve weeks ahead online; the full tasting menu, the fermented and dry-aged Anatolian courses, the wine pairing.
2.Mikla
The rooftop kitchen that invented New Anatolian; book a sunset table for Turkish cooking with Scandinavian restraint and a skyline view.
Mikla, on the rooftop of The Marmara Pera in Beyoglu, is where modern Turkish fine dining began. Mehmet Gurs, of Turkish-Finnish-Swedish background, coined the idea of New Anatolian here — Turkish ingredients and traditions handled with Scandinavian minimalism — years before the Michelin guide arrived to award it a star. The seasonal tasting menu moves through Anatolian grains, herbs, dairy and meat with a clean, restrained hand, and the room is one of the great settings in the city: a glass-walled terrace looking across the Golden Horn to the old-city skyline, the call to prayer drifting up at dusk. The menu runs in the upper part of this list's range. Book ahead and ask for a sunset table on the terrace. Come for the restaurant that set the template, with the best view of any kitchen here.
Reserve ahead, terrace table at sunset; the seasonal tasting menu, the Anatolian grain and lamb courses, the Turkish wine list.
3.Neolokal
A one-star kitchen reviving Anatolian recipes with a Green Star for sustainability; book it for the most thoughtful Turkish tasting menu in the city.
Neolokal, on the top floor of the SALT Galata cultural centre in Karakoy, is Maksut Askar's project to take the home and regional recipes of Anatolia and rework them as a modern tasting menu — and it carries a Green Star alongside its Michelin star for the seriousness of its sourcing and waste-conscious cooking. Askar treats dishes most fine-dining kitchens ignore, the stews and grain dishes and preserves of the Turkish table, with real intellectual care, and the result is the most thoughtful Turkish menu in the city. The room, in a restored bank building with a view over the Golden Horn, matches the cooking's quiet confidence. The menu runs in the mid part of this list's range. Book ahead. Come for Turkish cooking that takes its own tradition as seriously as any French kitchen takes Escoffier.
Reserve ahead online; the Anatolian tasting menu, the revived regional dishes, the Golden Horn view, the wine pairing.
4.Araka
A one-star kitchen built on vegetables and herbs by the Bosphorus; book it for the most personal Anatolian tasting menu in Istanbul.
Araka, in the Bosphorus village of Yenikoy, is the quietest and most personal of the city's starred rooms. Chef Zeynep Pinar Tasdemir cooks a highly individual tasting menu built around seasonal vegetables and herbs — an unusual emphasis in a cuisine famous for its meat and kebab — drawing on Anatolian produce and old preserving techniques to make plants the centre of the plate. The cooking is delicate and ingredient-driven, the dining room small and calm, the setting a leafy stretch of the European shore away from the tourist centre. It earned its Michelin star in the guide's first Istanbul edition and has held it since. The menu sits in the mid part of this list's range. Book a week or two ahead. Come for a one-star Anatolian menu unlike any other in the city, led by vegetables.
Reserve a week or two out; the vegetable-and-herb tasting menu, the seasonal Anatolian courses, the Bosphorus-village setting.
5.Ciya Sofrasi
The Kadikoy table reviving forgotten Anatolian recipes; go for regional Turkish cooking you will find nowhere else, at honest prices.
Ciya Sofrasi, in the Kadikoy market on the Asian side, is the most important traditional restaurant in Istanbul and the antidote to every tasting menu on this list. Musa Dagdeviren — less a chef than a culinary anthropologist — has spent decades collecting regional Anatolian recipes from across Turkiye and serving them from a no-frills counter and a few tables since 1998, dishes from the south-east, the Black Sea and the villages that no other Istanbul restaurant cooks. You point at the day's stews and mezes laid out at the front, or order from the grill, and eat food with real depth of history for a fraction of fine-dining prices. It is a regular on the 50 Best Discovery list and a pilgrimage for serious eaters. Go at lunch, order broadly, try whatever is unfamiliar. Come for the truest taste of Anatolia in the city.
Walk in at lunch; the daily regional stews, the kisir and mezes, the kebabs, the unusual sour-cherry and stuffed dishes.
6.Asitane
The kitchen reconstructing Ottoman palace recipes from the archives; book it for dishes the sultans ate, beside the Chora church.
Asitane, beside the mosaic-filled Chora church in Edirnekapi, has done something no other Istanbul restaurant attempts: since 1991 it has researched and recreated the lost dishes of the Ottoman palace kitchens, drawing on the registers of Topkapi, Dolmabahce and Edirne and on the memoirs of foreign envoys. The menu reads like a history book — almond-and-apricot stuffed lamb, melon filled with spiced mince, dishes dated to specific imperial banquets centuries old — cooked with a gentleness and use of fruit and nut that modern Turkish food has largely forgotten. The setting, in a quiet courtyard away from the crowds, suits the seriousness of the project. Prices are moderate for what amounts to edible scholarship. Book ahead and order the historic dishes. Come to eat the way the sultans did, reconstructed with care.
Reserve ahead; the dated Ottoman-palace dishes, the stuffed lamb and fruit courses, a table in the courtyard.
7.Develi
The 1912 kebab house from Gaziantep; go for the pistachio kebab and a south-eastern feast where Istanbul eats meat.
Develi has grilled kebab in the Gaziantep tradition since 1912, when Arif Develi brought the cooking of Turkiye's south-east to Istanbul, and the Samatya flagship on the Historical Peninsula remains the benchmark for the genre. This is the other half of Turkish food, the half the tasting menus borrow from: char-grilled lamb, the famous fistikli kebap studded with Gaziantep pistachios, a long parade of mezes and lahmacun and pide before the meat, and a baklava to finish that is among the best in the city. The room is large, busy and built for groups; the cooking is unfussy and serious about its product. Prices are gentle for the quality. Go hungry, order the pistachio kebab and a wide meze spread, and let it run long. Come for the definitive Istanbul kebab feast, a hundred-plus years in.
Book for groups or walk in; the fistikli (pistachio) kebab, the meze and lahmacun openers, the baklava to close.
How Istanbul eats Turkish
Turkish food in Istanbul runs on a span no single tasting menu can hold. At one end are the New Anatolian rooms — TURK, Mikla, Neolokal, Araka — that arrived with the Michelin guide in 2022 and rebuilt Turkish cooking as fine dining. At the other are the things they draw from: the regional Anatolian kitchens like Ciya, the Ottoman palace revival at Asitane, the south-eastern kebab houses, and the meyhane culture of meze and raki that is the city's true social table. A real picture of Istanbul eating crosses the Bosphorus and the price spectrum both — a two-star dinner one night, a Kadikoy market lunch and a meyhane crawl the next.
A few mechanics. The starred rooms book ahead online and fill their best nights well in advance; the traditional houses take walk-ins and reward turning up hungry at lunch. Meze (the small shared plates) and raki (the anise spirit clouded with water) are the heart of a long Turkish dinner — order broadly and let it run for hours. Tipping runs around ten percent, often added as a service charge — check the bill. Turkish-lira prices shift quickly with inflation, so treat any figure as approximate. The Asian side, Kadikoy especially, is where much of the best traditional eating now happens. For the rest of the city's tables by neighborhood and occasion, the Istanbul dining guide maps it out.
Where not to look for it
Skip these for serious Turkish food
The Sultanahmet tourist-trap kebab houses with picture menus and waiters working the pavement. The blocks around the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia serve a flattened, marked-up version of Turkish food to people who will never return. Cross to Kadikoy for Ciya Sofrasi, or go to Samatya for real kebab, instead.
TURK Fatih Tutak or Mikla for a casual, decide-on-the-night dinner. These are reserve-ahead, set-tasting-menu rooms. When you want excellent Turkish food without the planning, the kebab houses and meyhanes take walk-ins, and Develi can seat a group for a feast at short notice.
Frequently asked
What is the best Turkish restaurant in Istanbul?
TURK Fatih Tutak, in Bomonti, is the only two-Michelin-star restaurant in Turkiye and the headline meal in Istanbul, where chef Fatih Tutak rebuilds Anatolian cooking with fermentation and dry-aging. For New Anatolian dining with a Bosphorus or Golden Horn view, Mikla and Neolokal are the one-star references. If you want the deep tradition rather than the tasting-menu version, Ciya Sofrasi's regional Anatolian cooking in Kadikoy is essential. Book TURK and the starred rooms well ahead.
How much does fine dining cost in Istanbul?
The starred tasting menus are a relative bargain by European standards, though Turkish-lira prices move with inflation. Expect roughly the equivalent of 120 to 220 euros per person before drinks at TURK Fatih Tutak, Mikla, Neolokal and Araka, with TURK at the top. At the traditional end, a full meal at Ciya Sofrasi, Asitane or Develi runs a fraction of that — often the equivalent of 20 to 50 euros a head. Istanbul gives you world-level cooking and street-level prices in the same city.
Which Istanbul restaurant has two Michelin stars?
TURK Fatih Tutak, in the Bomonti district of Sisli, is the only two-Michelin-star restaurant in Turkiye. Chef Fatih Tutak returned to Istanbul in 2019 after a decade cooking across Asia and built a tasting menu that reworks Anatolian dishes with modern technique — fermentation, dry-aging, precise plating — while keeping their roots legible. It is the most ambitious Turkish kitchen in the country and books well ahead for weekend tables. Mikla and Neolokal are the next rung at one star each.
What is New Anatolian cuisine?
New Anatolian is the movement that takes Turkiye's vast regional cooking — the herbs, grains, cheeses and techniques of Anatolia — and reworks it as modern fine dining. Mehmet Gurs coined the idea at Mikla, blending Turkish ingredients with Scandinavian restraint; Maksut Askar pushes it further at Neolokal with a Green Star for sustainability; Fatih Tutak takes it to two stars at TURK. It is a deliberate alternative to the French-modelled fine dining that dominated before, built on the conviction that Anatolia's own larder is deep enough to carry a tasting menu.
Where can I eat authentic Turkish food in Istanbul?
For the real depth of the cuisine, cross to the Asian side to Ciya Sofrasi in Kadikoy, where Musa Dagdeviren has spent decades reviving regional Anatolian dishes most Istanbul restaurants never touch. For Ottoman palace cooking, Asitane near the Chora church reconstructs recipes from the Topkapi kitchen registers. For kebab, Develi has grilled Gaziantep-style since 1912. These three, plus a meyhane night of meze and raki, are a more complete picture of Turkish food than any tasting menu.
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