Eski Babel Ocakbaşı Restaurant — Local services in Beyoğlu

This review consists of two visits, so I’d encourage reading both.

1st visit:

Excellent lamb mince kebab and mezze. Full of locals so you know it’s a good place.

Only negative is that they try to turn tables very fast. Felt pushed to leave as soon as we finished our mains.

The waiter refused to serve us the teas we requested, which is unusual and not the standard of service you generally get in Turkey.

That was a big shame because otherwise everything was of high standard.

—— 2nd visit:

Went for another visit recently. Based on the response to my initial review I thought maybe it was a one off that they were so aggressively trying to get us to pay and leave.

But sadly it was even worse this time! It was pretty shocking how many times the staff came to ask us if our food was finished, when it clearly wasn’t and we were just taking some time to talk in between eating.

As soon as we finished the food they asked if we wanted to pay. By this point we were too fed up and just wanted to get out of there.

I don’t know what their business model is, because the food is very good. But the service is appalling at times.

I initially gave it 4/5 stars for my first visit. I gave them the benefit of the doubt due to the review response about it being busy on weekends. So I went again on a weekday evening. Clearly the review was just saving face and didn’t really mean anything. Therefore I’m going to downgrade my initial review to 2/5.

If you’re going to provide a sit down experience, regardless of how good the food is, you can’t pester the guests...

My wife and I were walking around Istiklal and realized that it was problematic to find a place to dine there that we would like. Therefore, we decided to move a little to the side, where we noticed this restaurant. When we came up to look at the prices, the waiter standing there began very vigorously to persuade us to come in. We decided to enter in the restaurant because we also wanted to charge our phones, and there were sockets there. The interior was quite interesting, and the already mentioned waiter decided to direct all his cordiality towards us :). He personally brought either a bottle of water (and, at our request, changed it to water at room temperature), then fried green peppers with tomatoes (which we also did not order, and when we said that the peppers were spicy, he apologized and brought a saucer with kaymak), then my wife really liked the eggplant kebab (he showed how to peel the skins), then the delicious lamb skewers (he showed how to remove the first portion from a skewer with pita bread and then took each skewer that was freed), then tea, and also joked and was interested in our plans and impressions. In general, the time flew by unnoticed and fun. I can’t call the price of lunch low, but by St. Petersburg (Russia) standards it...

Scammers! Highly recommend to avoid this tourist trap, expect +25% of the ordered items’ price in the final bill. Like this we payed 650TRY instead of 500TRY food value. The math: food price for some items (like a beer) was higher in the bill than in the menu items we didn’t order were added to the bill 70TRY tax, which wasn’t disclaimed before, neither was on the menu notes. There was a “no smoking” sign inside, but several customers, including chef in the kitchen were smoking non-stop. There are such an amazing choice of restaurants in the area, don’t fall to this...