Şimşek Pide

On a 12 day trip to Turkey, I ate my fair share of Turkish pizza /​pide, and this was by far, the best one that I found. Located at the top of Taksim Square, it’s worth the trip to come eat here. With no English on the menu, the owner /​server that spoke little English, no WiFi, a few pictures on the wall, and all local people, this was one of the more inexpensive and most delicious meals that I had. I wish I had come here sooner so that I could have come here twice on my trip.
Because everything is better with butter, they slather butter on the dough so it’s extra buttery, crispy and tasty. Just don’t think about that when you eat the pizza — it’s worth it. Between 5 of us, we got 2 pides, and it was enough food. And at ~40 Turkish lira ($ 14 USD), it’s a pretty cheap meal. We got the beef and cheese pide with an egg on top, and it was delicious. The beef was cubed, the meat was good quality (was not tough or chewy), and I was pleasantly surprised it was not ground beef.
We also got the mixed pide which had a generous amount of vegetables, sausage, pepperoni, and we added an egg on top.
I’d recommend both flavors that we got — the server recommended both of them to us – and I’d love to come back and try all of their other flavors. They have a wide selection, probably 30 or so to choose from, but you probably can’t go wrong with any of them. I couldn’t read anything off the menu because it was all in Turkish, but the server was able to tell us what all of them were: usually a variation of meat and cheese and or meat & vegetables.
Come here with an appetite and a group of people so that you can try a few things. It’s all super fresh, as they make everything to order in a tiny kitchen in the back. Highly recommended if you’re in Istanbul — I’m still dreaming of this pizza!

Absolute delight in the heart of Taksim Square! «Pide» is one of my favorite dish in Turkey especially if it was made from «Blacksea» region.

3.5 review. We tried to get in on the highly talked about Walking Food Tours around Istanbul but the top two places were booked up this past weekend. Trying to make the best of it — we decided to do our own mini food tour of several different establishments that included durums, Turkish coffee, firin sutlac (baked rice pudding), simit, kunefe and pide. I’m sure there is better pide in the city but a friend had recommended Simsek Pide so we added it to the list. We started walking toward the general area and noticed a huge crowd. Then we noticed the 50+ police. Then we noticed the water cannons, guns (rubber bullets I am told) and reserves of more police. We knew that Taksim Square is a popular area for protests (there was one two days before for May Day) but how lucky to nearly get caught in the cross hairs, right? Wrong. Any way, the people around us didn’t seemed phased so we gathered that police presence is pretty common and unless they started running we should be okay. We finally found Simsek and took our seats. If you are used to places that cater to tourists this is not the place for you. Very seedy looking and Turkish names don’t exactly match up with English names for lamb, beef, chicken, etc. so be prepared to point and hope for the best. We were halfway through our food tour so none of us were very hungry so we opted to split one pide just to get a taste. No clue what we ordered but it had several ingredients on it. Maybe 15 minutes later it came out and after scraping the egg off the top — it was quite tasty. Nice and buttery crust and good ingredients. Interesting twist on pizza and I’d definitely go back — but maybe after memorising a few Turkish food names. Large enough for two to split unless you are starving.

Excellent pide, smothered in butter! Definitely the best «Turkish pizza» we had in a month in Turkey!