Lux Lotus reader Madeleine Elfenbein burst onto my radar with her very sharp and insightful "journal of an American, a Broad." Melfenblog has recently been relaunched, and Madeleine was kind enough to send in a chic guide to "Above and Below It All in Istanbul" upon my request:
As someone who has traveled widely and lived a decade poised on the brink of effortless cool, in Istanbul I've met my match. This is a city that does not give itself up easily to conquerors. It's one thing to be cool on the Eastern seaboard, quite another to manage it in a city that's home to 15 million and speaks Turkish, with literally thousands upon thousands of cafes scattered throughout hundreds of neighborhoods. No matter where you go, you are teased by visions of darker coffee, fresher simit, prettier faux Byzantine murals and more tuneful calls to prayer just around the bend. Even if these visions are real, there's not much you can do about it. It's taken me seven months here to overcome my cafe anxiety and settle down with the choices I've made. Thanks to my labors, you can follow my advice on your visit and just be cool.
The trick to downtown Istanbul is to avoid street-level establishments--not that there's anything wrong with them, but their ubiquity ensures you will be haunted by uncertainty and remorse. Far better to go down a few steps and enter the murky subculture of your choosing: ladies who lunch in the semi-darkness, high school students comparing 300-dollar cell phones, transsexual prostitutes on their work breaks, embittered old leftists trading anecdotes about the "deep state," or British expats watching cricket on satellite TV over 15-dollar pints of Guinness--sometimes all in the same establishment.
Or take the elevator up five flights to gain a view of the vast, minaret-studded skyline. Top picks for the upper echelons include Araf, on Balo Sokak off Istiklal, a former greenhouse turned bar with a rotating program of Gypsy musicians, Bulgarian brass bands and noted Turkish DJs spinning the best of French 70s pop. The windows, trimmed with bamboo and palm fronds, look out over rooftops stretching down to the Golden Horn. Paris has nothing on Istanbul when it comes to rooftops.
The restaurant on the top floor of the Masonic Lodge is a great place for views of the Bosphorus and members of the Craft dining, not that you'll be allowed in if you're not as fabulously well-connected as I am. Don't worry, there are upscale and downscale alternatives: a 5th-floor hookah (narguile) joint where you can play backgammon and inhale cherry tobacco until your head spins, or the gorgeously appointed Teras Litera on the top floor of the German Cultural institute off Yeni Carsi Caddesi, where you can draw on atmospherically overpriced cocktails to the strains of jazz on Tuesday evenings or "Western music" on Fridays.
Right up the street is Cafe Ara, the vanity cafe of the Turkish photographer Ara Guler and the only place in town to get Mexican hot chocolate (which is what brought you to Turkey in the first place). Ara is regrettably a ground-floor establishment, but it's tucked into an alley behind the post office and features great salads and collectible placemats (photographs of ferries taken by Ara Guler).
Personally, I spend more time than I care to admit at Urban Cafe, a beautifully designed space on three levels with wrought iron and chandeliers on Kartal Sokak near Galatasaray High School. The service, food, prices and customer attire ranges from laudable to forgivable, yet I resent Urban for its stupid name and the fact that I am in thrall to its free wi-fi access. If you go with your laptop (as of course you will), you may catch the DJ ("Ergun," according to his Apple username) using your shared playlist, which will flatter you until you realize he's only playing your Al Green and nothing else.
This is really only the beginning, but suppose you're reaching the end of your rope, as happens not infrequently on a trip to a foreign country where people smoke indoors all the time and rarely smile (i.e., most foreign countries). The place you need is the Little Wing Cafe, a center for homemade food and music frequented by natives and foreigners alike, which improbably shares an alley with Istanbul's most distinguished nightclub, Babylon, off a side street near the Tunel end of Istiklal. Warm, unpretentious and ineffably hip, just like you: it is at street level, but this one you can afford to risk.
Visit Istanbul.com for the "official" guide to the city, and Melfenblog for more.
Previously: The Lux Lotus Travel Guide: Rob Walker on Savannah, Lux Lotus on The Low Countries.
I'm a big fan of the wrought iron chandelier
Posted by: Wrought Iron Chandelier | October 03, 2006 at 09:31 AM
Posted by: dnhmtp | June 27, 2007 at 08:39 PM