Balık ekmek in Istanbul: what it is, what to order, what to avoid

Overview

Balık ekmek means, flatly, “fish bread”: a fillet of grilled fish laid in a split length of white bread with raw onion, a few leaves of lettuce or rocket, and a hard squeeze of lemon. There is no sauce, no cheese, nothing warm but the fish. It is the plainest food imaginable and it is one of the things Istanbul does best, because the whole point of it is freshness and a griddle within sight of the water.

It belongs to this city rather than to Turkey at large, and the reason is geography. The Bosphorus is a migration corridor: fish move between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara through a narrow strait that runs down the middle of the city, and the sandwich grew up as the cheapest way to eat that catch standing on the quay. The classic fish is mackerel — uskumru — landed as it ran through the strait. That single fact explains both what the sandwich should taste of and why so much of what is sold now is a substitute (more on that below).

The waterfront theatre at Eminönü, by the Galata Bridge on the Golden Horn, is the image everyone has: gaudy boats done up in mock-Ottoman gilt, rocking on the wake of the ferries while men grill fish on board and pass sandwiches up to the quay. It is a genuine old trade turned into a spectacle, and the spectacle is now the least reliable place to actually eat the thing. The sandwich is better than its most famous stage.

What to order

The word is simply balık ekmek, and at a busy stall you often do not order so much as take one that is already being assembled. What is worth knowing is the small vocabulary that changes what you get.

• soğansız — “without onion”. The default is a generous handful of raw onion, sometimes dressed with sumac, and it is divisive. If raw onion is not for you, this is the one word that saves the sandwich.
• the fish itself — a good vendor works from uskumru (mackerel) or istavrit (horse mackerel), filleted so the sandwich is boneless or nearly so. Mackerel is the richer, oilier, more traditional fish; istavrit is smaller, cheaper and perfectly honest. Both are right. What is not right is a thick, bland white fillet that tastes of nothing, which is the sign of a frozen import standing in for either.

The sandwich arrives with lemon already on it or a wedge to squeeze; use it, because the fish is oily and the acid is the whole balance. Salt is usually on the counter. The drink that goes with it is not a soft drink but şalgam — a sharp, salty, deep-red fermented turnip juice — or ayran, salted yoghurt thinned with water. Both cut the oil; şalgam in particular is the local pairing and worth trying once even if it is startling cold.

Eat it the moment it is handed over. A grilled-fish sandwich is a hot-off-the-griddle food and loses the point of itself within a few minutes, as the bread goes damp and the fish cools to something flabby.

What to avoid

The thing to be wary of is the gap between the fame of the Eminönü boats and what they now serve. For years the fish in the most touristed spots has often not been Bosphorus mackerel at all but cheaper imported frozen fillet, because the local mackerel run has thinned and the crowds do not know the difference. The tell is the fish, not the setting: pale, uniform, thick fillets with no oily richness and no faint bones are almost always the frozen substitute; a proper uskumru is darker-fleshed, oilier and unmistakably a mackerel.

A queue is genuinely useful information here, more than in most street food, because the sandwich only works with turnover — fish grilled to order, not sitting. A stall with locals waiting is grilling constantly; an empty stall is reheating. But read who is queuing: a line made entirely of visitors photographing the boats says something about the view, not the fish.

Be alert to raw onion used to hide a tired fillet. A generous onion load is traditional and fine on a good sandwich, but a mound of it on a mediocre one is doing a job it should not have to. And treat the ornamental boats as what they are — a photograph. The better sandwiches in the same districts come from unshowy stalls and the covered fish markets a street back from the water, at Karaköy, Kadıköy on the Asian side, or Üsküdar, where the people buying are buying lunch, not a memory.

Practicalities

A balık ekmek is a cheap snack, not a meal out: roughly €3 to €6 for the sandwich, a little more with a drink. A price much above that at a waterfront stall is buying the postcard boat, not a better fish; a price suspiciously below it is buying the frozen import. The magnitude is the useful thing — this should always feel like street-snack money, and anything that feels like restaurant money is mispriced for what it is.

There is a real season, and it is worth knowing: mackerel run through the Bosphorus Strait mainly in autumn, so the sandwich is at its most local and its best from roughly September through the colder months, when the fish is fresh and near. In high summer far more of what is sold is imported, so if you are here in the cool half of the year you are eating it at the right time. It is an all-day food rather than a meal-bound one — as good at eleven in the morning as at four in the afternoon — and it is most reliable when a stall is busy enough to be grilling without pause.

Buy it with cash. The waterfront stalls, the ferry-side stands and the market counters are exactly the small operators the city guide flags as the likeliest to be cash-only, and a fish sandwich is not where anyone wants to be fumbling with a card reader. Tipping does not arise; you take the sandwich, you pay the counter, you eat standing at the rail looking at the water, which is where it is meant to be eaten.