Dinner in Cappadocia Is a Transport Problem

Cappadocia has no restaurant district. It has a provincial capital — Nevşehir, a working town of roughly a hundred thousand people that most visitors experience only as a dolmuş terminus — and beyond it a cluster of villages scattered across the eroded volcanic country between Nevşehir, Ürgüp and Avanos. What the brochures sell as a single destination is really that cluster, and the cooking changes as you move across it.

Göreme is the crowded middle, where nearly everybody sleeps and where the food is, in our experience, at its most compromised. Ürgüp is the wine town and the nearest thing to a proper Anatolian high street. Avanos sits on the Kızılırmak with the potters and a serious Friday produce market. Uçhisar looks down on all of it from a ridge, Ortahisar keeps the larder, and the villages south of Ürgüp still cook in a pit in the ground.

Dinner here is therefore a transport question before it is a menu question. Get the geography right and you eat very well for not much money. Get it wrong and you spend four evenings on the same strip in Göreme, reading the same laminated menu, wondering why a region this famous for its produce tastes so flat.

The dolmuş decides where you eat

The shared minibus, the dolmuş, is the backbone of the region and the thing that determines how far you can sensibly travel for a meal. The main service runs between Nevşehir and Ürgüp by way of Uçhisar, Göreme, Çavuşin and Avanos, which happens to take in most of the villages worth eating in. Ortahisar is not on that chain; it is reached by its own short-hop minibuses, which is part of the reason it stays quiet. You pay the driver in cash and you can flag one down anywhere along the route.

Frequencies are the part to establish on the ground rather than from home. Services are built around local needs rather than around dinner reservations, they vary with the season, and no published timetable we saw was worth planning an evening around. Ask at your hotel on the first morning, or at the bus station in Ürgüp or Nevşehir, and ask specifically about the last run of the evening rather than the daytime pattern. That single answer decides whether eating in another village is possible at all. Treat any meal outside your own village as needing a return plan made before you sit down.

The distances themselves are small. Göreme to Uçhisar is about four kilometres, to Ortahisar about five, to Ürgüp about eight, to Avanos about ten. A taxi between Göreme and Ürgüp typically takes ten to fifteen minutes and is not expensive by European standards, but agree the fare or ask for the meter before you get in. If you are eating in a hamlet with no evening service at all, ask the restaurant to call your car when you order rather than when you finish; in our experience that is the difference between a ten-minute wait and forty.

The other thing that wrecks a Cappadocian eating schedule is the balloons. A flight means a pickup in the dark, roughly an hour aloft, and a landing that returns you to your hotel mid-morning with no appetite and a celebratory toast already inside you. Do not book a long lunch for that day, and keep the big dinner for a night you are not flying at dawn the following morning.

Göreme: eat cheap, eat early, or book

Göreme's main street is the region's tourist funnel, complete with menu-waving touts, and the ratio of good kitchens to indifferent ones is worse here, in our experience, than anywhere else in Cappadocia. It is also where most visitors are based, so the trick is to know the handful of exceptions and otherwise eat cheaply and well rather than expensively and badly.

The village's real value is in its bakeries and quick kitchens. Fırın Express turns out pide, the boat-shaped flatbread baked to order, and it is the sort of place where two people eat properly for what a pair of coffees costs further along the same street. Order the kıymalı with minced lamb or the kaşarlı with melted cheese, and ask for an egg cracked over the top. Nazar Börek deals in börek, the layered pastry sold by the wedge, and does a competent gözleme, the thin griddled flatbread folded around cheese, spinach or potato. Cafe Şafak is the breakfast and hiker-supply stop, and worth asking about a packed lunch if you are walking out through the Rose Valley. There are tea gardens on those trails — one sits directly on the Red Valley walking route — but they are seasonal and irregular, and we would not plan a midday meal around finding one open.

For a proper dinner, a few Göreme kitchens justify the money. Dibek occupies a house locally said to be around 475 years old and serves the regional signature, testi kebabı, out of a sealed clay pot. Seten sits above the village with a terrace and cooks Anatolian rather than international food. Topdeck Cave Restaurant is a small family kitchen where reserving is effectively compulsory. All three fill in season: ring, or have your hotel ring, ideally a day ahead.

Ordering testi kebabı properly

Nearly every menu in the region carries it, and in our experience it is the dish most often mishandled. Lamb or beef goes into a narrow-necked terracotta pot with tomato, pepper, garlic and butter, the neck is sealed with dough, and the pot goes into an oven or a tandır for several hours. At the table it is cracked open with a small hammer. Because of that cooking time the good versions want notice — typically three to four hours, sometimes a full day. A kitchen that can produce one twenty minutes after you order it is decanting a stew into a pot for the theatre of the thing. Ring in the morning, ask for it that evening, and specify lamb if you are given the choice.

Uçhisar and Ortahisar: the view and the larder

Uçhisar is the ridge village beneath the castle rock, about four kilometres from Göreme, and it is where Cappadocia does its most formal cooking. Lil'a, the restaurant at the Museum Hotel, takes the region's older dishes seriously and, the hotel says, draws on its own garden for produce. It is a proper dinner rather than a casual one, and it needs booking. Uçhisar is also where Kocabağ, a Cappadocian winery producing since the early 1970s, keeps a cave tasting room, which makes a sensible pre-dinner hour.

Ortahisar, a few kilometres east, is the quieter proposition and the more interesting one if you care where food comes from. The rock beneath the village is honeycombed with cut stores that stay cool and stable through the year without any refrigeration, and for decades they have held potatoes from the surrounding plateau and citrus trucked up from the Mediterranean coast. Eat in the square under the castle rock, where the kitchens are aimed at the village rather than at coach parties: white beans slow-cooked in a clay pot, a plate of tandır lamb, bulgur pilaf, a glass of ayran. It was the best-value lunch we had in central Cappadocia, and on both occasions we ate there we were the only foreigners in the room.

Ürgüp: mezze, wine and Saturday morning

Ürgüp is a town rather than a village, with a market and an ordinary Turkish high street behind the tourist frontage, and if you are serious about eating there is a case for basing yourself here rather than in Göreme. Enough of the dinner options sit within walking distance of the centre that you stop depending on the evening minibus altogether. The trade-off is a longer daytime hop out to the walking valleys — but that is the easier journey to make, because it happens in daylight on the busiest stretch of the route.

Ürgüp is also the centre of the local wine trade. Turasan, a family firm making wine in the town since the 1940s, runs a cave cellar with tastings, and the white to look for is Emir, the region's native high-altitude grape: dry, mineral, and alongside mezze better to our taste than the imported whites on the same lists. For reds, Öküzgözü and Kalecik Karası are the dependable Turkish names.

Wherever you land for dinner in Ürgüp, order the mezze rather than a main course — stuffed vine leaves, smoked aubergine, walnut and pepper paste, yoghurt thick with garlic and dried mint. The cold table is where a Turkish kitchen shows its hand. Around Cumhuriyet Square the ordinary lokantas serve what the town actually eats at midday: trays of stews, düğün çorbası, mantı. They typically wind their kitchens down early in the evening, which catches visitors out. Mantı, the small yoghurt-dressed dumplings, is a made-in-advance dish, so the lokantas are where to eat it and the middle of the day is when there is still some left.

The Saturday market, generally held through the morning, is where to buy the edible souvenirs. Pekmez is the thick grape molasses pressed here in autumn; pestil is the same fruit pulp spread thin and dried into leathery sheets; köfter is the set, chewy lump form of the molasses; and the walnut-threaded string sold alongside both is cevizli sucuk. Add dried apricots and pumpkin seeds from the Nevşehir plateau. Go early — by the middle of the afternoon the stalls are usually being packed away.

Avanos: clay, and Friday in the streets

Avanos, about ten kilometres north of Göreme, sits on the Kızılırmak, and its potteries work the red clay from the river; the narrow-necked pots that testi kebabı is cooked in are made and sold all over the town. The old quarter of stone houses stands on the northern bank. Friday is generally market day, when the produce stalls take over streets in the centre: honeycomb, slabs of village butter, whatever fruit is in season, sacks of bulgur and dried pulses. It is a working market rather than a craft one, and it was the best hour of food-watching we had anywhere in the region.

For dinner, steer clear of the riverside operations running "Turkish night" shows with folk dancing, which are a different product sold by the coachload. Bizim Ev, in a converted old house up in the town, is the one to book, and testi kebabı is the fair thing to order given where the pot came from. If you want the underground ceramics museum, Güray Müze, treat it as a separate outing rather than something to fold around the meal: it is on the far side of the river from the old quarter, a little over a kilometre away — roughly a quarter of an hour's walk each way, crossing the water — and it keeps daytime hours, so it belongs to the afternoon, not to the evening you are eating.

South of Ürgüp: village kitchens worth a taxi

Mustafapaşa, about six kilometres south of Ürgüp, was a Greek Orthodox town until the population exchange of the 1920s, when it was known as Sinasos. That older name still turns up in tourism material and in Greek-heritage contexts, though the town is Mustafapaşa in ordinary Turkish use. The carved stone houses and the church of Saints Constantine and Helen are what survive of it. The Old Greek House, a nineteenth-century mansion which its owners date to the mid-1800s, has run as a hotel and restaurant since the early 1990s and serves home-style Anatolian cooking at low tables. Order whatever the day's dolma is: the stuffed vegetables are the point.

Further out, in the small valley village of Ayvalı, Aravan Evi cooks largely from its own garden in an in-ground tandır — casseroles, flatbread, soups, bulgur dishes. It was the best meal we ate in Cappadocia. It is around a twenty-minute drive from Ürgüp with no useful evening bus, so arrange the return car before you go. Both of these village kitchens are modest about alcohol, and some village restaurants do not serve it at all, which is worth confirming when you book rather than discovering at the table.

What to order, what to leave, and when to come

Order the slow things. Anything out of a clay pot or a tandır — testi kebabı, çömlek fasulyesi, tandır lamb — is what this landscape's cooking is actually about, and it is what village kitchens produce without visible effort. Order the mezze in Ürgüp and the pide in Göreme. Order the local white with everything.

Leave the international menus, the pizza, and any dinner that arrives with a floor show. Leave the coffee-and-dessert upsell in the cave hotels and buy lokum and pekmez at the market instead. Çiğ köfte — the raw-bulgur patties worked with pepper paste and eaten wrapped in lettuce — is sold across Turkey now and you will certainly find it here, but it is a southeastern dish, from Şanlıurfa and Adıyaman, and eating it in Avanos tells you nothing about Avanos. The same applies to kabak çiçeği dolması, stuffed courgette flowers, which turn up on summer menus in the region but belong to the Aegean. And treat the Turkish breakfast, the sprawling serpme kahvaltı of cheeses, olives, preserves, eggs and bread, as a meal that replaces lunch rather than precedes it; most hotels include a version, and paying for a second one out is usually a waste of an appetite.

Two matters of timing. Kitchens across the villages contract through the winter, a number close outright between roughly November and March, and hours shift during Ramadan. The April-to-June and September-to-October windows are the ones we would choose, with one caveat that follows directly from the transport: evening minibus service is generally thinner outside high summer, which is the strongest argument for sleeping in Ürgüp or Göreme rather than in a hamlet, and for keeping the village dinners — Ayvalı, Mustafapaşa — for nights when you have already agreed a car. And restaurants in a seasonal place have a short half-life. Confirm that anywhere named here is still open before you build an evening around it; a call from your hotel costs nothing and saves a wasted taxi.