FORK PLAY 35 July 2 2008
Eating Istanbul. Gucci is the new Turkish Delight. Organic Meatballs. Farewell, Clay Felker.
Dear Friends and Family,
We're just back from eight days in Istanbul. I could say it was a blur of meals between monuments and markets and excursions on the Bosporus, but in fact, the images are sharp - the thrilling sweep of the city's low skyline  pierced by minarets seen from the east on the ferry.. sitting barefoot on the carpeted floor of the Blue Mosque while our guide details the Turkish rituals of marriage, circumcision and death..the metal detector inside the very slow revolving door at the entrance to the Swissôtel and the security guard at the curb checking for what I can only imagine under each car that pulls in. But there are no watchful soldiers in camouflage gear with machine guns as I've seen in Rome or in our own Port Authority bus terminal.
How the city has grown. Towering new hotels sheathed in blue glass, traffic snarled to a maddening creep, the explosion of luxury shops that suggests an emerging middle class with loose money to feed Gucci and Armani fantasies. Being me, I am focused on the best to eat .. what's hot and new, what's old and still a must. For my first report on what was good to eat - lunch at a communal table, a lush dinner in a garden up the street from the new W, supper on the terrace at Jean-Georges' Spice Market - go to BITE on my site.
My last memories of Istanbul in l999 after six weeks of sensuous submersion was of a traumatized city with thousands of people camped out along the shore and in the parks, fleeing the aftershocks of a killer earthquake in Izmit, 56 miles away. Two days earlier we'd been standing on the roof of the Four Seasons Hotel watching the total eclipse of the sun through tinted goggles. The next night I woke as the bed moved, strangely calm, in our host's landmark second house - a wooden "yali" overlooking the water.
"Is this what an earthquake feels like?" I asked Steven.
"I think it's the wind," he said, responding to a great rush of sound.
Then the phone rang, our host, assuring us, "Yes, it's an earthquake, but kilometers away. Have a cup of tea and go back to sleep."
I could hear the houseman in the garden with the dog. "You're supposed to get away from buildings," I said to Steven. "We should go out and sleep in the garden."
"Do you really want to sleep in the garden?" he asked.
"I guess not." I turned over and fell asleep as he lay awake through a hundred after shocks.
***
Europe Chooses Turkey
Now we are back as guests of the Tourist Office - the two of us in a huge troop of journalists, buttered up and  basted, primed for seduction in the hope our newsprint and photos and blogs will lure the world here in 2010 when Istanbul will be the "European Capital of Culture." The city's optimism is electric. The Four Seasons next to the Blue Mosque was a paragon of perfection nine years ago and now there is an uptown branch about to open. The new Ritz Carlton towers over our heads. Some streets look like Madison Avenue or Avenue Montaigne. I can't imagine how a tidal wave of culture hounds will get around in 2010 if the city doesn't throw up more tram stops, some monorails and skyways overnight. Perhaps they'll import guest workers from China. Go now. And when you do, don't miss the mezze buffet, the yogurt wheat soup and the kebabs with sour cherries at Ciya in Kadikoy on the Asian side.  I was also out of control with the marvelous house baked breads, olive salad, flatbread wrapped meatballs, peach tea and octopus cooked in red wine at Abracadabra in Besiktas where the menu boasts: "fresh, natural, homemade, hormone free, healthy, seasonal, local." Sound familiar?
I'm putting together my hot addresses in Istanbul for the Travel Section at InsatiableCritic.com in the next few weeks.
***
Celebrating Clay Felker: When It Was Cool to be Hot
A friend just called to tell me that Clay Felker had died. The news brought back a time when baroque writing and personal journalism seemed so fresh and remarkable. When I see the Clay from those early days, I see a grin of triumph.. contagious enthusiasm.
All the tributes will talk about his vision of a city magazine and what New York meant in the zip codes we cared about - it seemed that everyone who mattered in the world, i.e. Manhattan, read it. Probably half a million readers, but all of them in media and money. If he was elitist, we were too. What a hot house to write in. I was a newspaper reporter, dreamed of writing a novel, never aspiring to become a restaurant critic, but that's how Clay saw me when he called in 1968, a few months after the first issue of New York, arrived, thin and rather grey - no splashy graphics then, only Milton Glaser's bold covers. Clay was brilliant at casting and he loved writing. He treasured writers and though he could be demanding and testy and shout at you across the vast open space of a city room where no one could hide in a cubicle, he was quick with praise and an eager, mischievous co-conspirator in exposé.
There is so much media now, and if it's not irony we crank out, it's cool, so it's good to remember when Clay's New York was the first, the trippiest, calling the trends, getting inside the Saturday Night Fever, eviscerating the Couple of the Year, defining the Me Generation. He gave writers room. We weren't cool. We were serious and we were hot.
(The cover above is issue number one, April 8, 1968.)
***
Photographs of a whirling dervish, the Turkish chef, a young woman dishing up mezze at Ciya and the fabulous house baked breads and salmon tartare with bulgar at Abracadabra can not be used without permission from Steven RichterCopyright Gael Greene 2008
|
