I wrote about our delicious road trip along the Turkish Aegean coast earlier this week and it seems only right to continue. Right after Ayvalik which won our hearts and stomachs we ventured to another culinary destination - Cunda island.

Perfect Dinner Quest

Cunda, probably like most of the islands, feels very much a resort. Little sad off season but still very charming. Old stone mansions, fishermen boats and fish restaurants on the sea front, tourist shops selling anything made of pears, shells and other sea-gifts.

If you get lucky with the weather as we did it is worth climbing to the hill graced by a wind-mill looking chapel. Recently restored and turned into a library with a whole lot of valuable titles the place is open to the public and has a lovely veranda (Cafe Nostalji) where you can get a drink and marvel the view of the island, the sea and the neighboring Greece.

Soft late afternoon light slowly enveloping Cunda was a gentle reminder for us to start the quest for a perfect dinner spot. With the fresh memories of our unimpressive Ayvalik dinner we put more effort in research this time. We inspected a few places and had chats with at least a dozen of locals. Özgür was happy to prove that there is no source more reliable than local knowledge and intuition stronger than your own. Both brought us to a cozy restaurant with a fireplace Lezzet Diyarı (Sahil Yolu, No.10, Cunda). As the evening continued it turned we had picked the busiest place around the whole island (and probably Ayvalik).

We choose a few cold starters from the display and the waiter ushered us to the table “Cold meze are the same everywhere, you must try our hot ones“. This is how ahtapot hünkar beğendi (octopus with creamy eggplant pure), seaweed stew, sigara böreği stuffed with shrimps and grilled Hellumi-like cheese materialized on our table. Now, that was the golden standard of original and delicious Aegean food!

Along with a few cold starters and endless glasses of raki (Özgür) and respectable Yazgan‘s Sauvignon Blanc (me) we did not get to the fish. But we saw how later in the night a fishermen brought his catch to the door and the restaurant patron got outside with a scale to measure and evaluate the fish to be procured. That fresh and that delicious even off season - this is what good restaurant in a resort town means. And Lezzet Diyarı is beyond doubt one.

In Search of Ayvalik Olive Oil

We could not leave Ayvalik without buying some good olive oil. This is one of the advantages of a road trip really: you can take home as much food as your car trunk can accommodate. Ours is very accommodating. Which olive oil to buy though? With olive oil shop at every corner it’s hard to tell which one is THE ONE.

My rule of thumb with food shopping at an unknown destination is to start preparing before you get to a market or a shop. We sampled olive oil at a whole bunch of places where we had eaten as well as asked people where from and for how much they are buying. This is how you get an idea and potentially - a few leads. At one eatery folks even volunteered to buy olive oil for us. Yet being traumatized by the recent house painting incident I still had trust issues and preferred to do shopping myself.

Eventually we stroke gold at as we sampled oil at Lezzet Diyarı, our dinner spot at Cunda. That olive oil was flavorful and on the greener side (meaning less mature olives were used to press it) - just how I like it. We got the address of the shop to ventured into next morning.

Selene (Zafer Sokak, No.7) makes olive oil using stone mills which translates into excellent quality of oil. It is useful to know that olives take in the taste of everything they come into contact with: if instead of hand-picking olives you shake the tree and the olives fall on the ground then the olive oil made of this crop will have earthy taste. If the olives are pressed with metal press instead of the stone mill afterwards - the taste gets metallic. This is why we felt so fortunate about buying olive oil produced in an artisanal way from the source.

The shop keeper poured some olive oil into a little crystal glass. I warmed it up in my hand and then took a small sip slurping. Slurping helps enrich the oil with air and spread the oil throughout your mouth so you could get a better sense of its taste. Just as light night - its flavor was fresh, green fruit and not acidic. We left Selene with two 5-liter canisters and a large jar of pickled green olives.

The sad fact is that many Ayvalik olive oil factories producing olive oil in a traditional way (for instance, using stone mills for grinding olives) had closed down. They were unable to compete with the giants who consolidated and automatized the olive oil production. Those giants are now selling some of their upscale brands for 4-5 times the price you would pay for the honest stone milled olive oil artisanaly produced in Ayvalik. Locally the prices are minimal because of high local competition and lack of access the producers have to such attractive markets as Istanbul. On the one hand it is a great arbitrage opportunity for us to come and buy from the source at a much lower price on the other hand it is sad that nothing encourages preservation of the original olive oil production methods in Turkey.

Meeting Neighbors

Wandering the streets of Cunda before hitting the road again we stumbled upon a little place featuring a long list of home-made liquors, Küçük Yer (Zafer Sokak, No.10). Still warm with the memories of the cherry liquor we savored yesterday at Ayvalik I was intrigued. Özgür did not take long to convince to sample Turkish coffee and pomegranate liquor - he got that made of flowers and I went for the fruit itself. Ali Bey, the store owner produced two cups of damla sakizli (mastic flavored) Turkish coffee to go along with our liquors.

As we chat with him it appeared that Ali Bey was once our neighbor coming from Adapazari (Sakarya). Ayvalik and surroundings is probably one of the most diverse places in Turkey: after Greeks left Turks from many regions arrived to settle on the Aegean coast. Just like Ali Bey and his wife Sema now running a little restaurant with home style food and making house liquors and wonderful pomegranate wine. A few bottles were added to our take-home stock in the trunk.

As we savored the coffee and liquors it was only natural to discuss the prospect of retiring to a place like Cunda: open a little restaurant, serve our guests and listen to their stories brought from the far away places. Ah, those mind-clouding Aegean liquors: we so easily forgot that in a few days we would be heading back to out little hotel and restaurant in Sapanca to serve our weekend clients. Well before the retirement and long after it.