Kebapçı İskender

It’s a ballsy move to only have one item on your menu. Do it right and you’ll never be in need of customers. Do it wrong — well you’ll be closing up shop in no time. On our food tour of Istanbul, our guide ( Unilocal Istanbul CM Gulfem) took us to one such place for dinner — Iskender Kebab. Ask for a menu here (as we naïve tourists did) and they will just look at you and laugh.
As the name suggests, the sole dish on the menu is the Iskender kebab — a plate of sliced grilled meat served on a flat spongy bread and doused in melted butter. It’s not healthy by any means — in fact it’s about as far from it as you can get — but the taste is spectacular. And for about 30TL (£10) including a drink, you can’t really ask for a better deal.
The meat was tender yet had a good sear with just a hint of char. The spongy bread absorbed both the meat’s juices and the melted butter with ease and may have been even tastier than the meat itself. I could have done without the tomato rice but the grilled mild chilli peppers were wonderful as were the refreshing chunks of tomato.
Afterwards, for dessert there is this awesome little sorbet shop down the street with the freshest, juiciest sorbets you’ll ever try. They make them in house and change the flavours based on whatever is seasonally available — it doesn’t get much better than that!

When I’m playing tourist in a city, especially in a new country, there’s nothing I like better than trying a dish I’ve never heard of. So when I was brought here and told it was great Turkish food, who am I complain?
Only it wasn’t Turkish food — it was a Turkish dish. Only one. We asked for menus and told, no menus, just İskender. So we ordered that.
And it was delicious.
İskender is like a deconstructed lamb doner kebab, so all the meat, bread and veggies on a plate, with a yoghurt sauce to the left and then covered in a butter sauce. It comes out hot and then the butter sauce it poured on top of it. And my god it was delicious.
This is a sit-​down spot and there are seats inside and out. The staff is friendly but speaks almost no English (but again, doesn’t matter, only one item.)
Although you see Iskender kebab all over Turkey, this is the spot it originated and who holes the rights to the name. So there’s that for sure.
This place has been around forever and it on the shop-​heavy, high-​priced shopping street on the Asian side of Turkey. The rest of the street felt bland, like every other street in Europe, but this was Turkey all the way. I loved it. Come, order the one item on the menu, enjoy.