Dinner of Delicate Pleasures
A long table, a card on every plate, and eight courses. Notes from Centre’s dinner on the 30th of September.
by Anamaria Roa
The card beside each plate explained the evening before anyone sat down. “This dinner exists for meeting, for conversation, for finding common tastes,” it read. The aim was to seat people who like making things, sharing them and having a good time at the same table.
Those people are the Centre community: artists, creatives and entrepreneurs, the ones building and making things in this city. A Centre gathering starts from a simple idea, that they should know each other, and that a table is the quickest way to make it happen. On September 30th it happened over dinner, with chefs Sinan Karaahmetov and Cihan Kesmez in the kitchen.
The table was a single long one, set for about twenty in a wood-panelled room lit by low lamps and sunburst sconces. Placemats alternated red and pink. Anthuriums stood in dark glass bottles down the centre, and each guest’s name was embossed into a folded piece of silver foil. Narrow glasses waited upside down in pairs.
The chefs’ menu leaned on fire. It opened with smoked mussel butter, sourdough crisps and charred lemon. Ember-roasted plums followed, laid over buffalo yoghurt with slivered almonds, purple basil and chilli oil. Then came fennel slow-cooked in olive oil with mandarin and green olives, and a tomato salad with young vine leaves and sumac onions. These were meze in spirit: small, sharp, and made to sit next to a glass that has turned white.
The middle of the meal grew richer. A jumbo prawn arrived wrapped in bacon, beside a pool of shellfish bisque dotted with green and red oil. Broccoli was smoked on the grill and served with tarator, burnt grapes and hazelnuts. Bluefish, the Bosphorus’s own, came with shiitake.
Dessert was two rounds of golden pastry around thick cream, topped with sugared redcurrants.
Seen through the window, the room looked the way the card had asked. Half the guests were still on their feet, mid-conversation, and nobody was in a hurry to sit or leave.
The card had a second paragraph, about the table itself. It called the evening “not a one-off dinner, but the beginning of a conversation that will grow over time”, a place people would want to return to and find familiar faces.
It signed off the way a good table in this city always does: afiyet olsun.
