Behind the Pass: A 726-Euro Evening at TURK, the Restaurant Whose Chef Just Cooked for 32 Heads of State

Before Fatih Tutak designed the NATO dinner that Trump wanted recreated at the White House, he built TURK — the restaurant that changed what Michelin thought of Turkish cooking. A total of 726 euros for the full experience. This is what it is like to eat there.

By TurkishBritish Magazine  |  Summer 2026

The numbers, to begin with. TURK, Fatih Tutak’s restaurant in Istanbul, charges what it charges. The evening described here — the full tasting experience with drinks pairing — came to 726 euros for two people. We note this upfront, for two reasons: because it is information that people deserve to have before they decide whether to book, and because the number, in the context of Turkey’s ongoing economic pressures, deserves honest acknowledgement. TURK is an expensive restaurant by any international measure; it is an extraordinary amount of money in a country where median household incomes have been eroded by years of inflation.

It is also, by the assessment of those who know the genre, worth it. Michelin does not award two stars casually. The committee’s inspectors eat anonymously, return multiple times, and apply a set of criteria that has, over decades, become the closest thing the restaurant world has to an independent audit. TURK’s two-star status — and it was, until this year, one of the only two-starred restaurants in Turkey; the second receiving its accolade in 2026 — places it in a category that contains perhaps 400 restaurants worldwide. That is the context in which the 726 euros should be understood.

The Philosophy of the Kitchen

Tutak’s approach to Turkish cuisine is, at its core, curatorial. He travels to farmers’ markets — he goes to the Bomonti organic market every Saturday — and builds his menus around what is seasonal, regional and traceable. The pantry at TURK is a lesson in Turkish agricultural geography: spices from Gaziantep, Adana and Erzurum sit alongside house-made preparations including hamsi salt (anchovy-derived) and hamsi powder. The vinegar comes from Manisa’s Akhisar district, early-harvest cold-pressed. The pomegranate molasses from Hatay is aged for seven years in barrels and then a further period in a cellar. The honey is from Erzincan, from hives at 3,000 metres elevation.

The crockery is made of olive wood, maintained in-house with regular oiling — never put in a dishwasher, never exposed to detergent. The knives, brought out for the meat course, are made by a craftsman in Mersin named Tüfekci Karadayı, with handles of rosewood and deer antler, bearing Tutak’s personal insignia. These details are not decoration; they are the argument that Tutak is making about what Turkish gastronomy can be when it takes itself as seriously as its ingredients deserve.

Course by Course: What the Evening Produces

The opening sequence at TURK deploys the pantry philosophy in compressed form. The amuse-bouche — a small cup of double-boiled chicken broth with yuzu oil, spring onion and a fried chicken-skin crisp — is technically accomplished and emotionally direct: it tastes like something a grandmother would make, translated into a language that would be comprehensible in a three-star kitchen in Tokyo or Copenhagen.

The wagyu çiğ köfte that follows is the dish that most divides first-time TURK visitors. Raw beef, Urfa bulgur, lavash: the presentation is elegant but the flavour is confrontational for those unfamiliar with the tradition. The cheese to which the chef’s team compares the flavour — “a rich, familiar taste” — is accurate; what is not quite accurate is the preparation to eat something that shares an olfactory profile with a mature raw-milk cheese but tastes, finally, of very good beef.

The palate-cleanser is tursu water — pickle brine — served in a glass with seasonal root vegetables, celery-leaf oil, and a lamb’s ear (a herb). The presentation is theatrical; the function is genuinely useful, clearing the palate between the raw beef and what follows. The drinks pairing at this point offers a non-alcoholic option called Özlem — a fermented elderflower and rose preparation that is one of the kitchen’s most successful creations and the kind of drink that makes guests who had chosen the wine pairing briefly regret their decision.

The egg course — a 64-degree yolk cooked in schmaltz (chicken fat), over a corn flour and acorn cheese cream, on braised black cabbage, finished with black truffle — is the technical centrepiece of the middle section. The truffle is real, shaved tableside, and its presence lifts a dish that is essentially a very sophisticated version of eggs and greens into something more than the sum of its parts. The bread that accompanies it is sourdough corn bread from a wood-fired oven, served with three combined butters — Trabzon, burnt Trabzon, and water buffalo — alongside Erzincan high-altitude honey and Manisa cold-pressed olive oil with the house pickle and pomegranate molasses.

The fish course arrives in two preparations: Bosphorus bluefish (palamut), marinated for two hours in salt, served with avocado and black caviar over a tomato pickle brine sauce — an unusual combination that works because the acidity of the pickle cuts through the fat of both the caviar and the avocado. The second fish is turbot from Sinop on the Black Sea, with black truffle and egg yolk sauce, alongside an Odeğmis potato preparation with hand-made bottarga.

The vegetable mosaic that precedes the meat course is, structurally, a demonstration of Tutak’s range: every vegetable from a different Turkish region, prepared by a different cooking method — grilled, pan-fried, deep-fried, roasted. Beneath everything, a tomato sauce. The tomato jelé on top is made from very hot peppers and is, the kitchen warns, genuinely spicy. Accompanied by water buffalo yoghurt from Manisa.

The lamb arrives in three cuts simultaneously: chop, crispy rib, and rib skin. Tokat onion, charred sweet red pepper, tomato powder, water buffalo yoghurt, and a sauce described as containing flavours reminiscent of kokoreç (lamb offal) with cumin. The combination is generous and technically accomplished. The knife made by Tüfekci Karadayı is presented at this point; its handle of deer antler and rosewood is both beautiful and functional.

The dessert sequence begins with the dish that the kitchen developed in collaboration with artificial intelligence — a concept that Tutak has been open about, framing it not as AI replacing culinary creativity but as a collaboration with a tool that can hold and pattern large amounts of flavour data. The result is a construction of ice on which sits a rose ice cream, a milk crisp, a bread caramel, milk foam, kaymak (clotted cream), and semi-dried sour cherry, finished tableside with a sour cherry reduction. It is delicate, not sweet, and structurally coherent: the kind of dessert that gives the mouth somewhere to rest after the intensity of what preceded it.

The closing gift — presented as guests prepare to leave — is a small box containing a handwritten menu (listing everything consumed over the course of the evening, with the names of the chefs), two chocolates, and a small bottle of limoncello-style spirit. The bottle’s label bears a lemon illustration. Inside the box, a folded card: “A Chef’s World.” Inside the card, a dedication.

The total for two people, all courses, drinks pairing, and the gift: 726 euros at the exchange rate at the time of writing. That will, as the restaurant’s own team acknowledges, vary. The experience will not.