About Sini

What we do

Istanbul has thousands of restaurants and most visitors have four or five meals. Sini exists to make those meals count: we choose a small number of places per neighborhood and per dish, say what to order, and explain why each one is on the list.

This website carries the editorial half of that work — how eating in Istanbul works, by category, by neighborhood and through our guides. Place-level curation lives in the app, where it can be kept current.

The selection filter

A place has to pass all five of these before it is published:

• One thing, done well. Specialists over generalists — a grill, a breakfast house, a pudding shop, a soup counter.
• Prices printed and visible. If the price is decided after you sit down, it is not on the list.
• No recruiting. A host on the sidewalk is a disqualification, not a welcome.
• A local crowd at local hours. Full at 1pm on a Tuesday, not only at 8pm in August.
• It can absorb visitors. We are careful with fragile four-table institutions; sending crowds to them destroys the reason they were worth recommending.

Sini publishes no ratings and no review scores, because a single averaged number hides the thing that decides whether you will enjoy a place. Where somewhere is not right for someone — too loud, no alcohol, no English, cash only — that is stated instead.

Editorial standards

• Specific, not aggregated. Pages describe formats, streets, markets, transport lines and seasons in Istanbul, rather than restating other websites.
• Dated. Every page carries a visible last-reviewed date, updated when the city changes rather than on a schedule.
• Sourced where it matters. Claims that a reader could check — closures, rules, seasons — carry a source on the page. Claims that cannot be checked are not made.
• Honest about gaps. Anything unverified — a price, an opening time, whether a place has survived the year — is left out rather than guessed.