Food & Drink
From what we saw, the restaurant meals were traditionally Turkish: humus and halloumi, kebabs and koftes. There was also a Turkish version of the Greek meze presentation for which I was unprepared. Once, many years ago, we had had a Greek meze in a village in the mountains above Paphos. It was 24 courses delivered 4 dishes at a time starting with delicacies such as quail egg with spinach on a tiny saucer and increasing in size every course until the conclusion included a near full stifado and a full kleftico. I hadn't realized the Turks had their rival version.
The first evening I ordered a meze at a place where no English was spoken and my limited Turkish was extremely rusty. I thought I had negotiated a meal of mixed meze and a bottle of raki to go with it. Sure enough, the raki turned up with six little dishes of meze - humus, halloumi, some stuff that looked like ezme by wasn't, and so on. Then ... a huge plate arrived with chips, salad, and a couple of lamb chops ... and lamb sis, and lamb stuffed vine leaves, and chicken sis, and fried liver. It was enormous. I no longer have a huge appetitite but I had thought that when the menu said it was 40TL it wouldn't be too big. Wrong. I did my best.
For beer - Efes was, of course, ubiquitous and the occasional Tuborg or other. And for wine - there was Turkish ... And French, and Spanish, and Italian, and so on internationally. Splendid. "We'll have a bottle of Chilean Malbec please. 50TL? Fine."