Yaka Balık Restaurant — Restaurant in Istanbul

We are from UK and were in Turkey for a week. We went to Yaka Balik Restaurant for an evening meal

Over experience of this place is: HUSTLE to get you into the restaurant. Best to stay away from restaurants under the bridge but this one is particular is an ABSOLUTE NO-GO! HORRIBLE SERVICE. They just dump the fish on to your table and never look back NO VALUE FOR MONEY: Charged us @ 200 TL for a fish and it comes with nothing but a dozen fries NO FLAVOR : Fish was just tossed on the grilled with no flavors or seasoning added CHEAT: Show you a fish and give you just any fish out of the kitchen rather than cooking the one you selected. DISHONEST: Add items your bill that you have not ordered or consumed HIDDEN CHARGES: Cover charges AND mandatory over 10% tip added. It is not discretionary you have to pay weather you like the food and service or not. THREATENING: If you express your disappointment on overall experience. They will argue and not shy to threaten you, implying you are in foreign land. BARELY LEGAL: All in all, I think what these guys are doing is barely legal.

This place brings shame to so many hardworking Turkish people working in tourism who are nice and friendly.

I am surprised that this place has so many positive reviews on tripadvisor. I suspect the legitimacy of the positive reviews here, given our experience.

AVOID THIS PLACE...

The view was okay and the restaurant is well situated. Nevertheless I will call this place a tourist trap, for reasons below;

-They spend more than 30mins marketing the fresh food menu to you because that’s the meal they extort tourists with. One piece of jumbo scrimp cost 120lira or so. That’s €12. Even by the ocean drive in Miami I never paid that for just 1 shrimp. Let’s not even get started on the price of the fresh fish 😆

-They charge you for water and bread. We spent a week in Turkey and never paid for these. Sadly this place will bill you. The owner says only govt restaurants give free bread and water so fair enough.

-I was offered a free birthday dessert, although they had asked for 50lira buy my friend insisted she won’t pay and they offered it complimentary.

-The food takes forever to be served. So you basically watch and pray lol...It’s understandable in the high season tho!

They offered pick up and drop off from our hotel, but I think it was just a strategy to rope us into spending money cos they factor that in billing you.

-We made our dissatisfaction clear to them and they offer us Turkish tea. Nevertheless it’s not somewhere I would want to go eat again.

Although the waiters seemed nice but clearly it’s a tourist trap which you can only go to, if you just wanna splurge while around the Galata...

I usually never write bad reviews, but the food was so bad I had to just write this. Tourist trap. We ended up getting fried calamari, Shepard’s salad, and the cheese filled rolls for appetizer and the sea bass, prawn, and grilled octopus as our entrees. Literally almost everything was terrible: the salad had rotten arugula in it and the calamari was slimy and not crispy at all. The cheese filler rolls were the best thing we got by FAR. The sea bass was completely flavorless, almost as if they literally boiled it in salt water and called it a day. The “giant” prawn was so small it was bite size. And the worst thing by a land slide was the grilled octopus which was horribly over cooked and tasted rotten and flavorless. Made me gag the first bite I ate it it was so bad, went back for a second bite to reconsider and almost threw up. Bill ended up being over 1000 lira, about 115 USD, WAYYYY to expensive for what we payed. Our previous nights dinner was worth 20 USD for four people and was exponentially better. Go somewhere else please don’t go here and put...