Around 1992, six years after he’d left his native Istanbul for Chicago, Metin Kurtulus was working as a waiter at the Italian Village, and customers were always asking him where he was from. “They would ask where to have good Turkish food,” he recalls with a smile. “But I was embarrassed. What some Middle Eastern restaurants called Turkish dishes were not real–they’re cheaply put together to make a quick buck. Those were not the dishes originated in sultan’s palaces or like the humbler ones my mother used to cook.”
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“Turkish food is healthy,” Kurtulus proudly declares. “We use more vegetables, fruits, and spices than any other Mediterranean country. And our taste is refined. We pound or slice the meat, only rarely serving it in big chunks, like the Greeks do.” He bristles at the thought of the Turkish dishes being served in Greektown. “Dolma is a Turkish word for stuffed, and doner means cooking on a rod. So when you look at a Greek menu, you’ll see a lot of stuff that the Greeks borrowed from us,” he says, betraying the centuries-old enmity between the neighboring countries.
Kurtulus says his family originally came from Macedonia and Bosnia, Muslims who retained ties with Turkey through religion. In the late 40s, shortly after the communists took over Yugoslavia, his parents fled to Istanbul. His father, who first worked as a health inspector, then as a grade-school teacher, took on a new surname, Kurtulus, which means “freedom.” Kurtulus remembers spending a lot of time in the kitchen watching his mother in action. “The smells, the way she cut the vegetables, how she carefully put meat into the oven–I learned to appreciate the amount of work needed for a good meal.”
