Istanbul food guide
The pillar guide: how meals work, the eight restaurant formats, and where to eat by neighborhood.
Sini editorial
Istanbul food guides
First-party guides to eating in Istanbul, written for visitors with a few days and a limited number of meals. Start with the food guide for how the city works, then use the dish glossary, the breakfast guide, the tourist-trap patterns and the three-day itinerary.
Start here
The five guides that cover how eating in Istanbul works.
What to eat
The five meals to eat first, then a full glossary with Turkish names.
Turkish breakfast guide
Every plate on the table, how to order for two, and where to go.
Tourist traps
The patterns, the districts they cluster in, and the two questions that stop them.
3 days in Istanbul
Monuments in the mornings, meals in residential districts, ferries in between.
Latest
New Istanbul food writing, most recent first.
Food etiquette
Order for the table, ask for the bill, tip in cash — and five words that cover the rest.
How these guides are written
These guides describe how the city works rather than aggregating other websites: formats, streets, markets, transport lines and seasons, named specifically. Restaurant names are not published here — venue-level curation lives in the Sini app, where it can be kept current and where the reasoning sits next to each place.
Each guide carries a visible last-reviewed date, and factual claims that need attribution carry their sources at the end of the page. If something changes in the city — a market moves, a district turns over — the date moves with it.