Actors and actresses can be spotted reading scripts at Cihangir’s packed sidewalk patios every afternoon, including at the neighbourhood’s most popular çay bahçesi(tea garden, at the corner of Sıraselviler Caddesi and Akarsu Caddesi).
Two establishments share the space here which is full to capacity from about
midday until late into the night.
This is a favourite hangout of culinary
writer and journalist Anya von Bremzen who says in her article ‘The Soul of a
City’ published in Saveur magazine in 2009: ‘Like other Istanbullus, I
develop a stubborn, irrational devotion to particular joints and food rituals.
Each morning I practically sleepwalk to my local çay bahçesi (tea garden),
where Cihangir's intellectuals crowd around tables laid out beneath tree
branches and grape arbours, all shadowed by our green neighbourhood mosque.
At
a çay bahçesi, you order your tulip-shaped glass of sweet çay (black tea) and
are free to linger forever.
I usually take along a breakfast of feta,
cucumbers, olives, and simit, a sesame-crusted, ring-shaped bread sold as a
snack by street vendors all over the city.
Two hours later, when the
wood-burning oven is fired up at the corner dive, I'm back at the tea garden
with my midmorning lahmacun: a pliant, smoke-tinged oval of dough topped with a
faintly spicy smear of ground meat, sprinkled with lemon juice, and rolled
around parsley sprigs and tomato slices.’
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