Güvenç Konyali: From Konya To Istanbul

People are generally frustrated about the restaurants offering local food outside their original places. Sometimes, they are just right about it because the solution to the problem is using the right ingredients. For example, it takes one bite for a person from Konya to understand the meat he or she is eating is not sourced form Konya if it is not from a lamb that did not graze over the Konya meadows. However, the Istanbulites are lucky to have a place to go for that matter: Güvenç Konyalı.

Having started to cook the original Konya dishes for the Istanbulites in 1988, Güvenç Konyalı is almost 30 years old with two restaurants in Sirkeci and one in Merter.

As I had the opportunity to try its Merter restaurant, the course starts to get served in reverse with okra soup as compared to the original Konya meals. Because the okra soup which is also an important dish of the wedding feasts is generally served as a digestive at the end of the meals but Güvenç Konyalı presents it in the beginning, probably to go along with the city’s culinary culture. The soup is prepared with dried okra flowers which are thrusted against a wooden sieve to make them smooth so that it can be enjoyed no matter if it’s the beginning or the end of the meal.

Two popular words that frequently pop up in the restaurant boards in Konya: Etli ekmek, which is prepared with meat and coarse flour brought from Konya and baked in a stone oven. However, I can tell that its taste is a bit of average.

Fırın kebabı (tr. Oven-cooked kebab) is the most popular dish of the restaurant. The dish is originally from the Seljuk cuisine but now adapted to the Konya cuisine. Güvenç Konyalı uses male lamb brought from the town of Ereğli in Konya. First the lamb meat is cooked only with some salt for six hours straight in copper pots in a stone oven using only woods. Once they are done, the meat is kept juicy hanging over burning cinders until served. You’re free to order lamb with ribs, shanks or without bones. With that, the tastiest parts are of course fore legs and ribs. After all those hours of being cooked, the meat becomes as soft as cotton; it almost comes off the bones without touching! Both how it looks and its taste are quite successful.

Although your stomach is nearly full after the lamb, there is another taste that you should give a try to: cevizli sac arası (pronounced as jhe-viz-lee suhj are-uh-suh).

Its name roughly means dessert with walnuts in between iron sheets. Once the dough filled with walnuts, the sliced pieces are placed over a sac, another sac is placed over them. To heat the upper sac, pieces of cinders are placed over it as well. So the reason behind the name of the dessert is its way of being cooked. As much as you see high-tech kitchens everywhere nowadays, unfortunately the traditionally prepared cevizli sac arası is a hard thing to come across. As we may call it a sweet version of rose-shaped börek with sherbet and walnuts, it has such soft texture with pleasant amount of sweetness that even I, someone who doesn’t have a sweet-tooth, can be tempted by it.

Another thing that I want to talk about the restaurant is the staff. While it is almost a must in other countries for the staff to be knowledgeable about the food served in the restaurant, we often face the fact that the staff is not amply informed about the dishes, keep silent in response to the questions of the customers and even worse, give wrong answers if asked for information. For this reason, we appreciate the staff, especially Süleyman for the friendly care and being quite informed.

It is high time for lamb meat which is what makes the spring even a tastier season. If you don’t want to miss the chance to eat it in its season, Güvenç Konyalı is recommended to everyone in Istanbul…

Bon appétit and enjoy the taste of life…