Istanbul - Culinary Backstreets Istanbul - Food Tours — Local services in Beyoğlu

I had a ton of memorable and wonderful experiences during my trip to Istanbul, but Hidden Beyoglu with Culinary Backstreets was my favorite of all! Our tour leader Esin was awesome -- easy to communicate with (even when two groups got lost on the way to the meeting point), shared lots of local insight to the neighborhoods we walked through, and had a lovely rapport with the restaurant and shop owners we visited and even some neighbors we saw along the way. I was on a solo trip and everyone in the group was so easy to talk to.

The food was all delicious! My favorite was the manti, but we tried stuffed grape leaves, pickle juice, mezze with raki at a meyhane, tahini cookies, kebabs with ayran and, because it was October, quince with clotted cream! There were three vegetarians in my group, and we all had plenty of great options and certainly did not go hungry. I even went back to the manti shop and dessert shop that sold quince later in my trip.

We walked through so many neighborhoods withing Beyoglu, stopped at places I may have walked right past on my own, and had a beautiful 5-hour tour that flew by. I wish it was another 5 hours! I would recommend this tour to anybody and will definitely be doing more Culinary Backstreets tours...

I have recently completed 2 tours. The first was Hidden Beyoglu and the second Born on the Bosphorus. I booked them because I wanted to be able to see different suburbs of Istanbul outside of the tourist areas. I was not prepared for the amazing food that I tried, it was incredible! While these tours are definitely of a higher price bracket you get the value for money with the food that you are offered on the tour. I had 2 different guides both were very friendly and passionate about Istanbul, it's community and food. My only side note is if you are someone who strives to limit your single use plastic use, consider bringing your own cutlery if you intend to do the Born on the Bosphorus tour. This tour is a really wasteful trip in that sense and I actually found it really grating by the end. In particular our guides insistence that we take the single use wipes offered at every restaurant. This may be an individual guide thing though because for the Hidden Beyoglu our guide offered us liquid hand sanitiser at each stop in place of this and being a tour run at night we had metal cutlery at every place. Overall a fantastic experience which I will be...

Remziye led our group's merry evening dance around Beyoglu and was a wonderful and knowledgeable communicator.

It was great to learn about the traditional foods of Istanbul, how they have been changed by waves of immigration, emigration and cultural mixing.

Even better of course was that we got to taste all the evidence. The tiny fried dumplings were my favourite but the artichoke was the best prepared I have ever had.

Seeing people drinking red juice on the streets is now no mystery as to what it is, only why they would want to: the tour will tell you all about it.

We were both hungry from a day's travel but by half way in, we were full and we still had the Anatolian influences and other treats to go. It's a good job we got some mild walking in and a break for a lesson in the local alcohols, with a city panoramic view before yet more tastes.

Although it was my first visit to Istanbul, I've been in Turkey for 4 weeks on previous occasions. I picked up more foodie knowledge on this one evening than I ever had about Turkish cuisine before.

Good event: start...