Akbıyık Balık Evi

A lovely little fish house in Old City. A wonderful experience — we ate outside and the waiter brought us a tray of appetizers for us to choose from, explaining what each one was. We had the tabbouleh — truly delicious — and octopus, which I hadn’t had before. To me it tasted like pickeled canned tuna with a more rubbery feel. It could have become an acquired taste, but then one of my colleagues reminded me that octopus are actually very intelligent, and I suddenly didn’t feel much like eating it any more, and dug in to the tabbouleh.
The same colleague had ordered a lovely white wine for the table, and the waiter was extremely attentive to make sure our glasses were always filled.
Next the waiter explained our choices for the main course and of course we all had fish. I had the locally caught fresh bluefish (see photo) which was perfectly done — melt in your mouth taste.
(If you have it and you’re annoyed at the small bones, you can get many of the out if you carefully rip out the spine from head to tail. This won’t take out all the bones, just most of them, so you’ll still want to be careful.)
I had noticed that lots of adorable feral cats hang out at the restaurant. The locals and tourists feed them and this is encouraged by the restaurant owners — the citizens of Istanbul love their feral cat colonies and take care of them communally as a shared responsibility, which is something I really appreciated about Istanbul and her people.
The waiter came by after we were finished with our meal and tried to offer us some truly heavenly looking desserts (again with the tray!) but we were all far too stuffed for such endeavors.
Instead we had some after dinner wine and coffee before heading back to our hotel.
I really enjoyed the food and ambience here — and the cats! — and would definitely recommend it as a good place for dinner.
Enjoy!