The Chefs Putting Turkish Food on London’s Fine Dining Map

Three restaurants. Three Turkish chefs. One overdue argument: that Anatolian cuisine belongs at the very top of London’s dining hierarchy — and the Michelin Guide is beginning to agree.

There is a sentence that Selin Kiazim has said in various forms across several interviews, and it is worth quoting directly because it captures something important about the moment Turkish cuisine is having in London: “I pitched it as a restaurant that would put Turkish food on the map.” She was talking about Leydi, her all-day Istanbul-inspired restaurant inside Hyde London City’s Grade II listed Farringdon building. But she could have been speaking for a generation of Turkish and Turkish-Cypriot chefs who have spent years making exactly that argument — in dining rooms, in kitchens, in the patient, unglamorous work of changing what a city thinks it knows about a cuisine.

In 2026, that argument is being won. Not all at once, not without resistance, but unmistakably. The Michelin Guide — the ultimate arbiter of fine dining prestige in Britain — now lists both Yeni in Soho and Zahter in Carnaby among London’s recommended restaurants. Neither yet holds a star, but a Michelin recommendation is not a consolation prize: it is a formal acknowledgement that a restaurant operates at a level that demands serious critical attention. For Turkish cuisine in London, that acknowledgement carries weight.

Zahter: Istanbul on Foubert’s Place

At Zahter, chef Esra Muslu has built what she describes as a love letter to Istanbul — specifically to the city’s vast ethnic heritage, drawing from Greek, Armenian, Persian, Ottoman and Levantine traditions. tbmag The restaurant, tucked just off Carnaby Street on Foubert’s Place, operates around a wood-burning oven and charcoal grill, and its menu moves through the day from a generous Turkish breakfast spread to evening mezze and grilled plates.

The Michelin inspector’s verdict is characteristically precise: if you’ve just returned from Istanbul and want to keep that holiday spirit alive, Zahter is the place to go — the chargrill and wood-burning oven used to good effect on everything from prawns with chilli and garlic to succulent chicken thighs with peppers and tomato. tbmag The hummus, arriving with crispy fried chickpeas, has become something of a signature — a dish that sounds simple and tastes like a revelation. The baklava, meanwhile, has acquired something close to cult status among London food writers: razor-thin filo, vivid pistachio, syrup calibrated to exactly the right degree of sweetness.

What Muslu has achieved at Zahter is a particular kind of authority — the authority of a chef who knows exactly what she is cooking, where it comes from, and why it matters. The result is a room that feels, at its best, like an extension of the city it celebrates: cosmopolitan, layered, alive with flavour.

Zahter, 30–32 Foubert’s Place, Carnaby, W1F 7PS

Yeni: The Tasting Menu That Changed the Conversation

If Zahter represents the spirit of Istanbul’s neighbourhood dining elevated to Michelin-worthy precision, Yeni — chef Civan Er’s Soho outpost of his acclaimed Istanbul restaurant Yeni Lokanta — represents something more explicitly fine dining in its ambitions. It is the only Michelin Guide-listed Turkish restaurant in central London applying Istanbul-trained technique to British seasonal produce over an open fire. tbmag

The tasting menu is the essential Yeni experience — a sequence of dishes that demonstrate, course by course, what happens when a chef with deep roots in Anatolian tradition applies the rigour of contemporary fine dining to ingredients that have been central to Turkish cooking for centuries. The yeni mantı — dumplings in a 24-hour fermented yoghurt sauce with beef bone reduction — is the kind of dish that makes food critics reach for superlatives and then put their pens down, because the experience exceeds what language can easily convey.

That Yeni has achieved Michelin recognition while remaining true to its Turkish identity matters beyond the restaurant itself. It establishes a precedent: that Turkish cuisine does not need to compromise, soften or translate itself for a fine dining audience. It needs only to be cooked with the skill and conviction that it has always deserved.

Yeni, 55 Beak Street, Soho, W1F 9SH

Leydi: The Ambition to Put Turkish Food on the Map

Selin Kiazim describes Leydi’s cooking as “pure, unadulterated Turkish cooking” that takes its cues from Istanbul’s lokantas and meyhanes. tbmag The restaurant, which she developed as chef consultant in partnership with Ennismore’s Hyde hotel group, is her most ambitious project to date — a 90-cover all-day dining room inside a historic Farringdon building, running from Turkish breakfast through to late-evening mangal grilling.

The interiors have been described as a toned-down version of Sketch if it were set in Istanbul — powdery pink walls, framed artworks, tastefully tiled floors and shell-shaped seats. tbmag But it is the food that justifies the journey. Head chef Halil Simsek, who trained at some of Istanbul’s finest restaurants before working alongside Kiazim at Oklava, brings a precision to the kitchen that is evident in every dish. The mangal section alone — hand-chopped Adana kebap, Welsh lamb kebap with dripping pide, chicken thigh shish with fenugreek marinade — would be enough to make Leydi worth visiting. That it is also serving what many reviewers are calling London’s best Turkish breakfast makes it essential.

Leydi does not yet have a Michelin recommendation. It should. And given the trajectory of London’s Turkish dining scene in 2026, it is surely only a matter of time.

Leydi, 6 Holborn Viaduct, Farringdon, EC1A 2AE

Tas: The Institution That Started It All

Any honest account of Turkish fine dining in London must also acknowledge the debt owed to the restaurants that made the scene possible before the Michelin inspectors came calling. Tas — with branches in Borough, Bloomsbury, The Cut and beyond — has been serving Anatolian cuisine to Londoners since the late 1990s, building the audience, the appetite and the civic goodwill that made the current fine dining moment possible. Its Anatolian cuisine — hand-prepared hot and cold meze, the signature charcoal mangal, traditional casseroles and seasonal specials — has been a reliable constant in a city that often prizes novelty over consistency. tbmag

Tas is not Yeni or Zahter. It does not aspire to Michelin recognition, and it has never needed to. What it offers is something equally valuable: the accumulated trust of a diaspora community and a city that knows exactly what it is getting — and keeps coming back for it.

What Comes Next

The question that hangs over London’s Turkish fine dining scene in 2026 is not whether the cuisine is good enough for Michelin stars — it demonstrably is. The question is whether the Guide will move at the pace the cooking deserves. Yeni and Zahter have their recommendations. The star, for at least one of them, feels imminent.

For the Turkish-British community that has been making this food in London for half a century, the imminence of that moment carries a particular charge. It is not validation — the food never needed validating. It is, rather, a formal acknowledgement of something that Green Lanes has always known: that Turkish cuisine, at its best, is among the great culinary traditions of the world. London is only now catching up with what the diaspora has always understood.