My Shawarma

I’ve eaten street food throughout the region—couscous, with what I assumed was lamb, in an open market in Marrakesh; a pasta, rice, onions, lentil bean, and tomato sauce concoction called koshari in Cairo; and shawarma in Beirut. I had mansaf, a lamb dish served with the head of the animal in the middle of a plate of rice, in the Jordanian desert; sheep intestines in the mountains of Lebanon; and camel in upper Egypt.

It couldn’t be food poisoning because this is Istanbul, with some of the greatest food in the world. In fact, the first time I visited here a decade ago was to write about food—from classical Ottoman cuisine to the modern Turkish kitchen. My friend Engin Akin is one of the country’s great food experts, an anthropologist of Turkish food. Her groundbreaking book From Tents to the Palace explains how a once-nomadic tribe that conquered much of the known world perfected its food to create a suitably imperial cuisine. If it was food poisoning, Engin would know. Unfortunately, it was 3 a.m., and I couldn’t safely call for another four hours, maybe five.

Perhaps it’s because your head is hanging over a toilet, but when you have eaten something wrong, the clock, as your stomach has, turns upside down. To figure out how you got to this place, and how long you will remain this way, the forensic chronology must begin with what you last ate, working backwards.

I had a nightcap at the hotel bar and spoke with Emre the bartender about Ireland, where he studied English. But I ordered Scotch. Maybe that made him mad. I snacked on a few peanuts, and an olive, which actually didn’t taste great. I wonder.

For dinner I met a friend in the Beyoglu area, not far from the hotel. We walked along Istiklal, one of the city’s major streets, a broad pedestrian thoroughfare, with restaurants, clubs, and nearly as many tourists as locals. For dinner we had a number of cold and hot meze dishes, including fried cheese, beef cheek, and a lamb dish with baba ghannouch and béchamel, which was an especially delicious plate. My friend is a well-known TV journalist, with some controversial opinions. Maybe she was the target.

In the afternoon, I sat in a café and read a guidebook about Mimar Sinan, the chief Ottoman architect who served under four sultans and built so much of Istanbul in the 16th century. I ordered a Turkish coffee and a raspberry éclair. I probably shouldn’t have also had the cupcake with the likeness of Yoda rendered in pistachio icing, but as everyone knows, it’s the time of Star Wars—and Turkish pastries are awesome.

Lunch I ate with a friend down by the Bosphorus, a dark and dramatic body of water that moves like a hunting panther’s shoulders and haunches. The direction of the traffic changes daily, one day feeding into the Black Sea, and the next the sea of Marmara, feeding into the Mediterranean. We saw the cargo ships lounging like stray cats and drank raki, Turkey’s version of the anise-flavored liquor popular throughout the Mediterranean. There was a simple tomato, cucumber, onion, garlic, and red pepper salad, and then a local sea bass grilled. And more raki.

Ah, I almost forgot! Right before lunch, as we were walking along the water, we stopped for some mussels, plucked straight from the water and sprinkled with lemon. It might very well have been the mussels—though they, too, were delicious, like everything else I’d had that day, starting with the sujuk, a spicy Turkish sausage, for breakfast.

Eureka. I felt better. Surely Hercule Poirot would have grasped the paradox. It was losing my conscious self by thinking of all the food that might have gotten me sick that cured me. I felt much better. Hungry. “Engin,” I said when she picked up the phone when I called at eight. “Where are we going to lunch today?”