2 hours ago
1
Opinion
September 18, 2025 — 5:00am
There is a solid argument for buying a 48-hour city pass and covering as much ground as you can in a new city. There’s a much better argument, however, for not running around all over the place, all the time. For narrowing the focus, limiting the exposure, and getting to know a particular street, small neighbourhood or beachside suburb in the short time you have.
Knowing I will be in Istanbul for 48 hours, I do my usual research and come up with a list of 65 must-visit restaurants, three food markets, five museums and four galleries. I’m exhausted just looking at them all, much less trying to tick them all off.
Then I notice that quite a few of them are in Karakoy, a lively area on the Bosphorus – think Surry Hills in Sydney, or South Yarra in Melbourne, only Turkish. I narrow my search for a decent, mid-priced hotel to Karakoy and choose the Novotel Istanbul Bosphorus (the “Bosphorus” bit might have been a stretch). Then I discover, on check-in, that one of my key restaurants (the wood-fired Murver) is on the hotel rooftop, and another restaurant (the easy-going and very delicious family-run Karakoy Lokantasi) is right next door.
This is ridiculous. I got more exercise on the plane on the way over.
So I take a walk around the neighbourhood. There are about 42 places for a Turkish breakfast behind the hotel on Mumhane Caddesi, from the much-loved Namli Gurme to Galata Simitcisi. After that comes coffee, and the charm of kittens running over your feet in the shady laneway of the very cool Karabatak cafe and coffee-roasters.
I walk south along the river to the Galata Bridge, and find the “new″ fish market, the stalls bright with silver-skinned hamsi (Anatolian anchovies), as the local vendor swirls his tray of little tulip-shaped glasses from fishmonger to fishmonger, dropping off their cay (black tea) with great sleight-of-hand.
Lunch at the nearby Ali Ocakbasi is notable for the fierce heat of the charcoal grill, the sizzle of lamb fat, salads jumping with dried olives and figs, and the tiny, scary, rattly, ancient iron lift that takes you to the fourth floor.
A good lunch should always finish on a high, so I stop at the local dondurma street kiosk, as the bloke works the mastic ice-cream with a strong wooden paddle as if rowing frantically upstream.
What a shame, I thought, that I was nowhere near the historic Gulluoglu baklava bakery I had heard about. Oh. It’s three doors up from the hotel. Good grief, there’s the Hotel Peninsula, which comes in at $1500 a night. Must go and take a look at people who have never heard of Novotel.
One of my nicest discoveries is a humble-looking corner cafe called Fasuli with not much going on except a chef stirring a gigantic pot of rust-coloured beans. Some excited pointing later, and I have a bowl of buttery beans that blows my mind, for $5.
And through it all, I discover the very best things in my neighbourhood are the people. Everyone I meet is busy, but they always have time to talk or help with directions or suggest the right dish to order. One watchmaker fixes my wife’s broken sunglasses and refuses payment. Another shop-owner, when asked where to buy batteries, gives me his own.
It is just 48 hours, but because I stay in the neighbourhood, I have time to go back to the same cafe three times for coffee (hello, kitty!), and get to two museums and four restaurants, on foot, in my own sweet time. Somehow, I have found my own city pass.
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