Akyol Uygur Lokantası — Restaurant in Fatih

Terrible experience. We visited the restaurant and it was a complete mess from start to finish. The staff couldn't understand either Chinese or English, even with translation apps — they randomly took our order without any real communication.

After ordering, our dishes were served to the wrong tables, and many of our dishes were simply forgotten. We had to wait more than an hour — from around 8:00 PM to 9:15 PM — just to receive the first plate of food, while we saw other customers who arrived later getting served, eating, and leaving before us.

When we asked the staff about our food, they just walked away without giving any clear response. They couldn't understand questions even with repeated attempts in Chinese, English, and Turkish translation.

When we finally paid, they randomly calculated the bill, charging us for dishes we never received and for wrong items served to us. To make it worse, they overcharged 50 liras on the credit card transaction without explanation.

The food itself was acceptable — decent flavors — but absolutely not worth the chaos, frustration, and disrespect. A beef bun listed on the menu was served as lamb instead, without any notice.

If the service had been even remotely organized, I might have considered coming back. But after such a disastrous experience, I can only strongly advise others to stay away. Definitely not worth the risk of ruining your evening for...

We visited this place with a group of expats yesterday: 22 people to be exact.

We encountered very limited hospitality and slow service. Obviously, this is not a place to go if you have a company more than 10 people. Some items in the menu were not available. Those were the downsides of the restaurant.

However, the quality of ingredients, and the content of the dishes were way over satisfactory. So delicate, savory, and rich. 5 out of 5! I’m not an expert in Uyghur Cuisine, I can only evaluate how the dishes taste. People originally from Uyghur region could do a better and objective assessment.

Soslu makarna(ramen looking dish in the bowl) was a bit spicy. You’d better be careful before you order. Manti was very similar to Uzbek style-juicy and flavorful. The rice with meat was mediocre. The pilaf was okay but the meat was fairly better.

If the restaurant improves its service quality, upgrade the interiors, and makes the place more authentic, then the restaurant has the potential to become a top notch Uyghur restaurant in Istanbul.

My regards to the chef!

Overall rating...

Let me start off by saying the food is actually not bad, however, almost everything else was! A group on three of us came to this restaurant at lunch time, there was also another young man who had just come in. The server immediately took the menu from his hand and presented it to us as we sat down. Apparently the young man had not yet ordered so he also had to share the menu viewing at our table with us. However he was a nice guy so we didn't mind. Few other things of note, the bathroom has no lights and no flush, it's Asian style hole in the ground. Our waiter understand no English and it was unclear if he understood Turkish either. We had to communicate with the translator on simplified Chinese. When our food came out, it had gravy and we wanted rice. After spending a few minutes translating we understood that if we wanted rice it would take another 30 minutes for them to cook it, and we decided against it.

This was by far the absolute worst restaurant experience in Istanbul, do not go here, there are plenty of...