イスタンブール旧市街の料理の秘密

Excellent tour of the Old City, including the Egyptian Bazaar. Very well organised, Ugur was engaging, very knowledgeable and friendly, making this a memorable experience. The tour really does take you to taste food and see parts of the Old City that most first time visitors would miss. Come hungry and don't make a dinner reservation for the evening!

This tour was so good! The food in Istanbul is absolutely incredible so this was more of that plus trying some traditional dishes that we hadn’t had yet. The best part was visiting parts of the city that we wouldn’t have stumbled across ourselves, including a couple of stunning mosques. The people along the way were beautiful. Our guide, Ibrahim was funny, warm and knowledgeable. We ended up being the only two on our tour so were able to have a private experience and stop at little shops as we wanted to. We had so much fun. Definitely recommend. And definitely come hungry!

A fantastic experience. Ibrahim was so knowledgeable and generous with his time. he went to great lengths to make sure we had a great time. Seeing the way he interacted with traders and the general community was a really pleasing part of the experience.

I've been on a number of food tours around the world. The guide was very social and knowledgeable about Turkey and its history. However, to be the guide felt pushy and took offense when I didn't want to try something. Usually food tours have food family style, where you pick the food and quantity you want. However, the guide plated the food for us and determined the quantity (often way too much), and even plated items I had no interest in trying. When I pushed back, the guide seem to take offense and often I had to push back multiple times. Also, at 5+ hours, it was way too long. I would suggest a 3-3.5 hour tops, and a big adjustment to the guide’s behavior. I've never had such a pushy guide on a food tour. On the plus side, the food was really good. Between the guide’s behavior and the length of the tour, it was not a good experience.

This was our 12th Culinary Backstreets tour and it certainly again exceeded expectations. Our guide Ibrahim was extremely knowledgeable, friendly, and clearly knew the people we were visiting. He put time into making it a great experience for us and that shone through. 10/10 would recommend.

Excellent tour- Ugur was a delight. He is knowledgeable about food, its preparation and history, and about everything else I wanted to know about Istanbul and Türkiye. I got to taste a great selection of foods I never would have tried myself, and left feeling comfortably full but not wanting to die. That said, definitely don’t have breakfast before this tour.

We had a great experience being taken through all the back streets by Esin to a wide variety of family run food businesses. The tour was well paced and allowed plenty of time at each stop to savour the particular foods and discuss them. Esin was very knowledgeable and entertaining. She really engaged with our family (5 adults) and we had a lot of fun. The range of culinary delights is very extensive, from a typical breakfast selection to every sort of meat dish in all the various preparations to the pastry and sweet options, including balaklava and lokum. The tour takes time and this is an advantage because one can enjoy some walking between each location. Esin knew everyone at each stop so it felt very personal. One would never find any of these places just wandering around the Old City. They really are hidden away. A classic was the wholesale spice merchant whose selection and prices meant that we could not resist some purchases. Allow time to enjoy the tour, ours was about 7 hours, but there was a lot of chatting and sampling all the way. Very good value for money. Esin provided a book by Culinary Backstreets that highlighted some great eating places in Istanbul (by district). This proved useful in the ensuing days. We have done many food tours and this one definitely ranks in the first three, made all the better with the excellent company of Esin.

+17

Our tour guide, Ibrahim, was so knowledgeable and super fun. Great sense of humor and very open to answering questions. It was a great experience and highly recommend it

We had a friend recommend to do this tour & it is certainly one we would recommend to all visitors to Istanbul. Everything we tried was the best quality and we certainly couldn't have found it ourselves. A big thank you to Ibrahim Karlidag who was very generous with time and knowledge about the food its background. He made it a very memorable day.

Katerina was excellent. We had a great food tour.