Breakfast Heaven at Patiska Bağ Evi, Bozcaada

A brief stay on Bozcaada concluded our Aegean road trip this time. The island has long being luring me with its wines and food, and hence seemed impossible to skip as we were driving from Alaçatı back to Istanbul.

I am not a seasoned island traveler, but my limited experience tells that islands might be deceiving. From my childhood I remember the sense of adventure but also isolation as we did the island hopping on the Volga river as an extended family of 4 adults and 3 kids on a small motor boat of my uncle. I felt Tom Sawyer-like as we went exploring those desert islands with my dad, but also I remember how a meal planning mistake resulted in a dinner of black tea and dark rye bread roasted on a stick over the open fire.

As a grownup I visited the Lofoten Islands in Norway that stroke me with their unearthly beauty, but also extravagant weather. The island greeted me enveloped in the rain and fog. After three days the fog cleared and reluctantly revealed the stunning scenery of the island. And then four years ago I spent a few days on the island of Korchula in Croatia that offered a restorative escape, but also a malaise. After I was traveling the country - north to south - for 2.5 intense weeks I escaped to a small family run-pension on Korchula where I relaxed myself into a malaise that kept me lethargic for the good part of my stay on the island.

However for good wine, food and other happy attributes of the island living I was ready to be deceived again.

I decided where to stay on Bozcaada after reading an article about the island eateries. That’s right, while readying about where to eat I found a place to stay. All the suggestions sounded worthwhile, but there was one that seized my intention immediately. The magazine wrote about Patiska Bağ Evi where its owner Oya treats her guest to an exquisite breakfast and Ali makes small-batch sourdough that he ships all over the country. Breakfast and good bread, what more to wish? We called Oya and booked a room.

Or I wish we booked a room as Patiska Bağ Evi was full. Bağ evi, or a vineyard house, is a common type of accommodation on Bozcaada known for its grapes and wine making. Bağ evi does not necessarily mean you are staying at the vineyard, but rather assumes you are at the countryside rather than in the town. Patiska Bağ Evi is in the condition of permanently booked, so it takes some good luck or forward planning to get a room. Fortunately for us Oya also runs a small cozy pension on a quite street in the center of Bozcaada, and this is where we slept with comfort, but we spent most of the time at the Bağ Evi, a short drive away from the pension.

Oya’s mother Nihal Hanım greeted us on the small cheerful terrace at the back of the pension. 84-year old Nihal Hanım, Istanbul-born lady with impeccable manners and fantastic sense of humor, received us as the long-missing family members and treated to a cup of tea and a chat that went long past the midnight. Next morning she accompanied us to the bağ evi. As we were sipping tea in the shade of an olive tree and waiting for the breakfast to be served, Nihal Hanım got crocheting another set of beautiful placemats that adorn the tables at Patiska.

Patiska Bağ Evi is set amidst a lush garden and complete with graceful long-legged Anatolian shepherd Shiro, ever anxious cocker spaniel Pasha and clumsy teenage Hamur. The spacious property includes a covered area dedicated to the bread making and otherwise open to the guests, a well-stocked kitchen with baskets of fresh produce picked from the garden, a terrace to enjoy Olya’s breakfasts and dinners as well as a huge green lawn to hang out and stone cottage houses where guests are staying. What takes most of the property however is the garden.

Hayrettin Bey, an agricultural engineer by education, took us for the tour or his estate explaining how within 3 months he set up this exuberant garden supplying Olya’s kitchen with excellent naturally grown produce. He proudly showed his heirloom tomatoes that continue the lineage of the local crop known throughout the country. “Organic?” Hayrettin Bey was not into bold statements. “We can’t call them organic. For these vegetables to be organic the farms around us must be organic too. Unfortunately, not all our neighbors are too picky with their gardening practices”.

Meanwhile Oya was setting up a breakfast table, a celebratory welcome to Bozcaada, for us. Brisk and soft-spoken woman with curly hair and a few naughty pink highlights, she had been working in education before she opened her guest house at Bozcaada three years ago. Talking about her long-standing interest in cooking (and hospitality for that matter) she says, “Even when I worked at the university I could never understand how people could have just one dish for dinner. Imagine making a huge pot of spinach stew and stuffing your whole family silly with it. We had a neighbor in our apartment block who cooked like that. We ended up giving our key to her husband, so he could come and eat anything he found in our fridge”.

Oya’s pursuit for culinary variety materialized on the breakfast table. I let my eyes feast as more and more plates were arriving, and we kept re-arranging them until there was no room left on the table. Oya serves renown Cannakale tomatoes - huge, sweet and pink - sliced and generously coated in fine olive oil and nigella seeds. Along come other garden beauties picked up that morning: smallest cherry tomatoes, young cucumbers, snake cucumbers and thin-skinned green peppers (“These peppers are a powerful vitamin C deposit”, Hayrettin Bey encourages me to eat more).

Olya’s breakfast spread also includes cheeses - prized regional variety of pungent feta called ezine, mozzarella-like soft dil peyniri and goat cheese. She sources her cheeses from a local vendor that her family has been patronizing for over 50 years, and she’s got another trusted vendor for the locally grown and cured olives. Also Oya serves fantastic jams she makes with the fruits from the garden and the berries she buys from the village. She turns lovely village eggs into her signature omelet with green tomatoes, red peppers and herbs. And as if this was not enough, Olya creates something special every morning - being it zucchini and goat cheese focaccia right from the oven or pişi, a traditional Turkish grandma’s treat. And of course the bread, Ali’s sourdough (so good, deserves another post another time).

When I saw the whole breakfast affair assembled and presented on the table I remembered my first breakfast at Zeliş Ciftliği: such an extravagant abundance! But if you fight a desire to grab a plate and attack the table before anyone else devastates it, you realize that there is something more important than abundance here. The breakfast becomes a selfless act of caring for your guests and treating them to the best you can offer. And that matters more than the number of cheeses or jams you serve. This is what I sensed from that magazine article that brought us here, this is why the terrace was full of the others like us - looking for the place where somebody cared about them, for real.

I concluded the breakfast with an alarmingly good cup of coffee. I asked Oya where she was getting the beans from. “From the folks at Cup of Joy“, she said matter-of-factly referring to a trendy coffee shop in Istanbul run by a champion barista. “You are so cutting edge,” I teased Oya who treats her guests to a good single-origin coffee rarely found even in the Istanbul coffee shops. “I met Susan <co-owner of Cup of Joy>, and it kind of clicked. So they started sending us beans,” Oya explained. She did not make a big deal out of the fact that she served her guests the products she personally enjoyed. No pompous statements that many establishments make too eagerly these days.

Leisurely breakfasts followed by wine and conversation made us postpone beach to the late afternoon and dinner for even later. A few hours before the sunset I first swam in the ice-cold sea I did not know the Aegean could be. And then I was busking in the light rays of sun for the day letting the wild island winds dry me up. As I got in the car to drive back and change for dinner at Patiska, I felt how my energy drained, within a moment. As if I had been running for hours instead of hanging out on the beach. Oya was cooking a special dinner that night that we could not skip. So after a shower and an attempt on a positive affirmation I showed up for the al fresco dinner at the communal table wearing a fleece jacket and a headscarf.

Oya laid out a lavish Aegean feast of stuffed grape leaves, runner beans stewed in olive oil, steamed wild green of istifno served with garlicky yogurt, braised artichoke hearts, fresh zucchini appetizer, a medley of pan-fried potato slices and whole garden green peppers as well as a simple salad with tomato wedges, cucumbers, thin-skinned green peppers, onion and parsley. Meze were followed by the tender pan-fried whiting and yahni, or Ottoman-style stew of beef slowly cooked with vegetables and spices in a clay pot. I only wished I was in a better shape to enjoy the dinner. As I was not getting any better, we did not stay for the dessert - a gigantic watermelon from the garden.

It took an effort to get up next morning. As we were leaving for the breakfast at bağ evi, Nihal Hanım hugged me and said, “Get better! Being sick does not suit the spirit of Bozcaada”. She was right. The fresh air, the wind that did not look threatening any more, the peaceful energy at the terrace, lovingly prepared breakfast and the chat with the hosts and new friends slowly cured me. So much that I joined Oya for her trip to a weekly market where farmers from the island and the mainland bring their goods for sale.

Oya exchanged greetings with every stall vendor. “What? You know have a garden of your own?” one of them exclaimed realizing he had just lost a good customer. Oya bought two bunches of chard from him anyway. “To keep the relationships going,” she explained to me. Another female vendor offered her a sack of borlotti beans for a good price, “Look, all from my garden, no single empty pod,” the vendor split a pod to reveal the perfect pink and white marble patterned beans. A few minutes later the sack became a companion to Olya’s niece at the back seat of the car. I benefited from this offer and got some beans at the same price the woman offered to Oya.

“Try the nectarine. Heirloom variety,” another vendor fetched a few fruits from under the stall and passed them to Oya. Biting into the sweetest and most fragrant flesh we heaved out to the cheese vendor. As Oya placed her order, her cheese man kept slicing off generous samples for me to taste. Oya requested a sample of pungent eski kaşar so we could take it to Özgür (who happily ditched the market, for once). Before I knew the vendor handed me a massive package. “Nice sample,” I murmered in amusement. “Our vendors are generous to a fault,” Olya laughed.

I was dying to know what Oya would be doing with all her purchases and the new dispatch from the garden, but the beach and dinner plans were settled: we had made a reservation at Ada’m, a seafood restaurant Oya wholeheartedly recommended. For a moment I thought I might change the plan and stay back, but decided not to. Because I knew we would be back tomorrow for another breakfast.

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