This weirdness happened when me with my friends decided to dine at a fancy restaurant in Istanbul since everyone was convinced that we deserved it after 10 hours of walking. It was an exclusive kebab restaurant. Of course it was difficult to pronounce most of the names. But their menu card was detailed as you may have never seen before with complete ingredients and preparation times. We all chose one (me, the okura kebab ) and started talking about the day. The food arrived exactly as mentioned in the menu, some even quite earlier. With the richness in smell and hunger in our stomach we immediately started diving in. My friend who sat exactly across me in the table had ordered a kebab with eggplant stuffed with meat/rice and was struggling to eat it in the right way. All of a sudden there was this guy (we assume he is a chef!) who stood right beside my friend with a knife and fork in hand. He offered to help her with the right way of eating the dish. In not more than 2 minutes the rest of us (eight, we were nine in total) were staring at him/the plate/ my friend wondering what this guy was up to…
He chopped the egg plant, removed the inner layer smoothly with a knife, mixed it with the grilled veggies, minced them together further. All of this was in style, one could tell. We were already ogling our eyes against each other (Girls!). Once the food was minced, looking completely different from how it arrived, he added salt and pepper to them. Like icing on a cake. Whoooaa, but apparently that was not the finish line. He then went on to take a piece of bread from the table and stuffed it with the minced dish from the plate and folded them perfectly into a tissue and handed it to my friend. He silently stood there as she tasted it and said, “It tastes really nice and totally different!”. He gave us a smile and went away. Immediately there was all buzzing within the table because for the last five minutes no one took their eyes off what he was doing. Turkish people have been nice to us the entire trip and this was one other example :)
Oh and they offered us free Turkish coffee/ tea in the end and we left with our stomach full and a big tip.
Day 2 did end in style with the extremely friendly chef. ;)
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