Vedat Milor and food culture

Due to his academician identity and the years he spent abroad, Vedat Milor displays a direct, clear and objective attitude in his evaluations. While giving hints for a delicious meal and a favourable drink, he maps the savour spots by scrutinizing the restaurants.

How did your interest in eating and drinking start, and how was the process you have experienced reaching a meal and wine critic level?
My interest in eating and drinking has been there since childhood. But it started as a passion in 1981 after I went to USA. There, I discovered that wine is very pleasurable. For, at those times when wine had not became a luxurious item as now, you could visit each wine house in Napa and Sonoma, California and taste wine without paying or for a very inconsiderable price. This was an alluring way of amusement for me with a budget of a student. With wine, the interest in eating had also grown. Since then I’ve started to think about the wine and food harmony

After that you were in France for a time…
The period when I was in France was 1986; I was there to finish my doctoral dissertation. In France both my eating and wine interests had evolved from an overcurious amateur to a somewhat professional. Of course, the best restaurants of the world are in Paris, I’ve got the chance to know them. I’ve met plenty of new wines. 20 years ago, I got the chance to drink Romanee Conti and Petrus wines. I’ve travelled to various places for a wine trip. I went to Burgundy and Bordeaux. There, my interest had evolved into semi-professionalism in my young ages.

You have tasted and are familiarised with the cuisine of various countries in their own geography, where is Turkish cuisine among the cuisines of the world?
Turkish cuisine is being advertised. But we should change some points. Firstly, we should understand well the prosperity of Turkish cuisine. The prosperity of Turkish cuisine, in fact, comes from its locality. In USA, you eat the same food from east to west and from north to south. In prosperous cuisines there is richness in locality. In this respect we are prosperous, but one should separate cuisines from restaurants. In Turkey this prosperity hasn’t been projected to the restaurants. If one says that ‘the meals cooked in middle-class homes are the most delicious meals in the world’ I’d totally agree. However, it would be exaggeration to say that Turkish cuisine is in the top three. For the restaurant as an enterprise has developed more in the west. If you choose the top 100 French, Italian and Turkish restaurants and compare them we would fall way too behind. This has its own reasons though.

One of them is the quality of the material… In Europe, leading restaurants have various people in charge. They try to find the best material. For our situation, the responsibility of the purchasing manager is to buy large amount of goods at the cheapest price. First of all, the distribution channels need a revolution. Second, there should be plenty of fresh and quality material and these should be continual. Everything is connected to each other, actually… High quality good would come from the fields, the purchasing managers would buy the best, and they would pay the producers the money they deserve. And the producer would see that if he grew high quality goods he gets more money. People in Turkey go to expensive restaurants to see someone or to be seen, they don’t have a demand of quality yet. We have restaurants as expensive as the ones of France or Italy, but we do not have that good restaurants of course.

Compared to the European restaurants, where are the Turkish restaurants in respect to their menu, service quality and prices?
First of all, in Turkey the menu concept is faulty, menus are too lengthy. You offer options to people, but they couldn’t go beyond a certain level. One should offer less but high quality options changing by season, even days. Second, our chefs do not know what’s happening in the world. Note that Turkish meals are cooked only in one way, either they are grilled or baked or steamed. In other cuisines, various cooking techniques are applied to the same meal. The plain taste is very important… The plain taste may appear by mixing more than one taste. I mean you may add sauces and garnish so artfully that, secondary actors accompany the main savour. But you need an unbelievable coordination and capacity for kitchen to do this. Various chefs have to be at different stations preparing different things and at the end those things should combine wisely.

We’re more flexible compared to the restaurants in Europe. Even in the most expensive restaurants, if you wish something which is not on the menu, they would prepare it. But, go to a Michelin star restaurant, they take no notice of you. The menu is fixed, in no way it is customised according to your personal taste. The quality/cost ratio in Turkey is both good and bad. It is generally the worst in expensive restaurants, I mean they can cost up to 300$ per person as in Michelin star restaurants, but they don’t repay. These places are for seeing and to be seen, the sortie places… However, there are places without ambition, serving only one kind. In places like these, we are very good at labour-intensive meals in terms of cost.


We see that, in your articles, negative opinions about the restaurants follow. Do you think that your criticism is guiding? Does Turkish restaurant business make use of these criticisms? Do you have feedback?
I’ve been doing criticism abroad for a long time. In my web site www.gastromondiale.com I’ve been publishing my wine and food critic articles. I can say that, up to now, except for one or two example, no one has ever given feedback after a negative evaluation, but when they did, they did it very positively. Turks, in fact, are very open to criticism, if they believe you have good intentions. 

What do you think of the eating and drinking habits and dining culture of Turkish people? What are relations of this culture to the economical resources?
In Turkey, there is no link between the interest in the subject and the income level. I cannot say that rich people do not understand; this would be unfair but, not so much. In Turkey, most of the people that are devoted to eating and drinking and know this business are educated middle class. In every part of the world, the middle class goes out for dining frequently. They cannot in Turkey due to these prices. The restaurants need regular critical customers for the quality to increase. Most of the people eating out are wealthy youngsters. But they are going out for different reasons, and these do not increase the quality of the restaurant. We don’t have a gourmet population to press the restaurant owner for the better, for the excellent persistently. For this reason, many places which are “in” are not good places.

What do you think about the place Turkish wine business has come? At what level our wine culture on the world scale, in such a land where viniculture was born?
We don’t have wine business on a world scale. The first reason is agriculture. For the wine business to be good, the grape must be good and high quality. The best wines of the world come out from the oldest and low fertility vineyards. Most of the vineyards in Turkey are new… Apart from this, the fertility is so high. The vineyard owners and wine producers are usually not the same person. The grapes producer earns money on kilogram basis. Hence he tries to grow more grapes as possible. Therefore the quality decreases, and the wine becomes more diluted. If you attend the hectare/tonnes ratio, you see that it is 6-7 times of the world ratios. We don’t fully understand which grapes are grown on which territory. In my opinion, In Turkey none of the new French blends except for ‘gamay’ gives a good harvest. We have interesting products among domestic grapes, but as I mentioned before, the production conditions are not settled yet. However, from time to time, comes out wines surprising but at some level in Turkey. But these are not consistent and regular. For instance, there are noteworthy wines in Avşa, the ones from Nevşehir, Bozcaada and Mürefte are the same too…

Wines produced more honestly and simple unfortunately fall into the second rank, however we have to improve them. The best wines of the world are produced with harvest of biodynamic agriculture and natural ferments. Their fermentation period is long. Thereby the wine becomes more profound, more levelled. In Turkey, wines are being fermented in a very short time and by artificial ferments. These come with some drawbacks. The vineyards I’ve seen in Europe are richer in respect of ecology. Amidst the best vineyards of the world, there are hundreds of trees, plants and insects; these complement each other. The roots of the grapes are going much deeper. More profound, levelled wines, wines with some density are being produced.

When examining wine, the balance and the profoundness are two important factors. We are giving this density by artificial means. I call this the body. The wine critics cannot wholly emphasize this difference. If you put in sugar, the alcohol will be more; it will be ‘body’. It’s like a huge but hollow man; if he runs a little he would toil easily. The other one is like slender but strong man. The wines with dark colour, smelling oak and without any profoundness are a new trend now… Then these win the first prizes in competitions with unknown organisers where no serious wine brands in the world are participating. For a wine to be known around the world it should receive marks from specific experts. Yet, there aren’t any Turkish wines that have passed those tests, are known and in request around the world, and that can be sold in auctions. But there is a quest. For instance, last day I’ve drunk an Öküzgözü from Melen. It’s fairly hopeful, an honest wine. Their ‘Papazkarası’ and ‘Gamay’ wines were good too. Corvus has produced one or two good wines. From time to time there are wines that surprises me, that make me to say that ‘I may open one of these to one of my foreign guests.’

Where do you prefer to take your foreign guests visiting Istanbul?
I may take them to the Bosphorus, to a place with a marvellous view like the Four Seasons Beşiktaş. I may take them to Fatih Karılar Pazarı (Women’s Bazaar) to eat Büryan Kebab, to Sülaymaniye environs to eat kurufasülye (drybeans) or drink a wonderful trotter soup. It may be the Ottoman Balat where Mrs. Müge prepares Antep cuisine. We may eat ‘tandoori kebab’ or ‘etli ekmek (quickbread with ground meat layer on top)’ at Konyalılar Etli Ekmek. One may go to a fish restaurant at Anadolu Kavağı.

What are the places you enjoy going?
I enjoy the places I mentioned above. For a very luxurious place, I had a very good meal in Reina Şamdan recently… They’re cooking trotter soup and puffy pastry very well. I enjoyed Four Seasons. It’s a great pleasure to go to Karaman Balıkçı and eat turbot there. You cannot find the delight of eating bluefish salt bonito at Poseidon in anywhere else in the world. On one single condition, you would bring your own wine. Or you’d drink rakı. Almost everything at Beyti is good…

Interview by: Derya Atakan
In Istanbul
www.istanbul.com/inistanbul