Hotpotchi — Restaurant in Fatih

Hidden gem in the plain sight! I was walking around the area, and just decided to find something to eat on the maps and I saw this place. It's on the third floor of a building and you can see the small sign from the front. It's kinda awkward to enter from the first floor restaurant since there is no obvious way to go upstairs. If you walked on the side of the building, you will find a sneaky open door that leads you directly to the stairs, avoiding eye contacts to the bottom-floor restaurants.

I came in to a surprise of self-serving conveyor belt running, that I haven't seen in a while in Istanbul. I arrived, I sat down on one of the table, and the waiter (and the lady cook) came to me and doesn't seem to speak English well, but nice nevertheless and trying to accomodate me their best.

There are two types of soup base, spicy and not spicy. I ordered the spicy ones, I like spicy but because this soup use peppercorns as their spice, it has some sort of bitter aftertaste which annoys me. Regardless, I still enjoyed the food.

Because everything is self-pick, they count the end bill quite creatively. Every thing served in the conveyor has either skewer sticks or a plastic claws. One item may have two sticks or claws, so the price for that is doubled. So how they count is sticks × price per stick + claws × price per claw + soup base price, + portion of meat from the fridge (which I just discovered way too late after finishing my eating). So the bill will be surprisingly high if you can't stop eating before it's too late like me haha, but I still think...

I went to for the first time with my husband to try out this restaurant. We were the only ones in the restaurant but still wanted to try it out. Only to find out it was a disaster, due to the lack of communication with the people working there, we had no clue how the concept was, and we weren’t given all the info about the food menu. Shocker!! We picked the toppings we wanted without knowing the prices, but we asked once more and it was all fine. We were told if we wanted salt, and other spices we can take them for a table aside, so I took some chicken powder broth and some garlic sauce. I found an insect in the soup as well, but I only noticed it after finishing the food, and texted my husband about it since he was in the bathroom, and I didn’t take any pictures of it. Once we finished eating and wanted to pay the bill, they charged us 200 tl extra, when we asked what it was for, they replied that it was for the sauce, I was surprised and asked what sauce, they had charged us the garlic sauce we had taken, and that’s totally unacceptable. Why would a restaurant charge 100 tl extra for sauce that should have been there in the first place, included in the price. Also we paid way too much for what it was. Total deception, i HIGHLY DO NOT RECOMMEND YOU to go to...

The food was very delicious. There is a wide selection of ingredients and soups with different degrees of spiciness. Together with the sauce, which you can put together yourself, it tasted very good. The price-performance ratio was very good! The service was extremely fast and very friendly! The waitress was able to explain everything in English and helped with every...