The 14 Best Restaurants in Sultanahmet (Istanbul Old City)

Sultanahmet packs more famous sights into one small district than anywhere else in Istanbul, and you can eat very well there without leaving walking distance of your hotel. The locals’ pick is Tarihi Sultanahmet Köftecisi Selim Usta, serving köfte since 1920. Around it, this guide covers 13 more rooms worth your appetite: Ottoman palace cooking beside Hagia Sophia, fish in a restored 1927 mansion, steam-tray lunches, cağ kebab from Erzurum, and a dessert house that opened in 1864.

Who this is for: visitors staying in or near the Old City who want every meal within a short walk of the major sights. Nearly every entry sits in or just beside Sultanahmet, and the few short detours are flagged in their entries. This guide is part of our Istanbul neighborhood food guides, and if you are still building your sightseeing list, our guide to Sultanahmet covers the best things to do between meals.

The 14 restaurants at a glance

Restaurant	Area	What to order
Balıkçı Sabahattin	Sultanahmet	Stuffed mussels, then the day’s catch
Hamdi Restaurant	Old City	Kebabs and grills
Neolokal	Karaköy	New Anatolian tasting plates
Tarihi Sultanahmet Köftecisi Selim Usta	Sultanahmet	Köfte, bean salad, semolina halva
Matbah Restaurant	Old City	Rarely cooked Ottoman dishes
Hocapaşa Pidecisi	Old City	Black Sea pide
Şehzade Cağ Kebap	Old City	Cağ kebab with homemade yogurt
Hafız Mustafa 1864	Sultanahmet	Baklava, kadayıf, Âfet-i Devrân
Güvenç Konyalı	Old City	Etliekmek
Giritli Restaurant	Sultanahmet	Seafood with Aegean wild greens
Pandeli Restaurant	Eminönü (Spice Bazaar)	Anything across the 70-plus-dish menu
Bitlisli	Sultanahmet	Spicy kebabs, garlic Antep lahmacun
Balkan Lokantası	Sirkeci	Stews and soups from the steam trays
Deraliye	Sultanahmet	Dishes once cooked for Ottoman sultans

List of the 14 Best Sultanahmet Restaurants:

1. Balıkçı Sabahattin

Balıkçı Sabahattin serves seafood in a restored wooden mansion built in 1927, and the fish is sourced daily from local fishermen. The family-run room stays busy.

Start with the stuffed mussels, one of the appetizers Turkish cuisine does best, then let the day’s catch decide your main. The meze plates and organic salads hold their own beside the fish.

Time Out Istanbul named it the best seafood restaurant at the 2014 Miller Awards, and The New York Times has mentioned it twice for its rich menu.

2. Hamdi Restaurant

Hamdi, the founder and owner, arrived in Istanbul from Şanlıurfa at the end of the 1960s with a mobile grill. His kebabs drew a daily lunch crowd of locals, and over the years he bought three floors. Today the restaurant seats 320 people.

Come for traditional Turkish kebabs and grills. The view and the scenic location are a strong second reason to linger over lunch.

3. Neolokal

Neolokal sits inside SALT Galata in Karaköy, a short tram ride across the bridge from Sirkeci. Owner-chef Maksut Aşkar founded it in 2014 around a philosophy he calls the New Anatolian Kitchen, reinterpreting traditional Anatolian recipes with modern technique.

The kitchen holds one Michelin star in the 2026 Türkiye Guide, and it is the only restaurant in Turkey with a Michelin Green Star. That second award recognizes how the team works with traditional producers, collaborates with a kitchen garden, and composts its waste into fertilizer.

If you want one chef-driven, special-occasion meal during your stay in the Old City, this is the short detour worth making. Reviewers consistently mention the storytelling behind each plate as much as the cooking itself.

4. Tarihi Sultanahmet Köftecisi Selim Usta

Ask locals about the best restaurants in Sultanahmet and Tarihi Sultanahmet Köftecisi Selim Usta comes up first. Köfte holds an important place in Turkish cooking, and this room has served some of the finest examples since 1920.

It is popular enough that booking makes sense. Without one, walk-ins wait half an hour on average for a table.

Beyond its Istanbul branches, Selim Usta also operates restaurants in Azerbaijan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Cyprus.

5. Matbah Restaurant

Ottoman cuisine deserves at least one dinner during your time in Istanbul. What could be better than eating the food of the empire that ruled the streets you are walking? Matbah is one of the best places in the Old City for exactly that.

The kitchen revives some of the least known and hardest-to-cook Ottoman dishes, and the menu reaches well beyond them into Turkish and Anatolian cooking.

The restaurant has collected national and international awards along the way, including at the Istanbul Gastronomy Fest in 2014.

Reservations: https://www.matbahrestaurant.com/

6. Hocapaşa Pidecisi

Hocapaşa Pidecisi is the choice for eating the way locals do on an ordinary weekday. The room is simple and welcoming, and the oven turns out a wide range of pide, the flatbread often described as Turkish pizza.

Pide is popular everywhere in Turkey, and each region bakes its own version. Our favorite here is the Black Sea pide.

The blend of flavors on that fresh dough earns pide a spot near the top of any Istanbul eating list. Order one and see for yourself.

7. Şehzade Cağ Kebap

You may know your way around kebabs, but have you heard of cağ kebab? The dish comes from Erzurum in eastern Turkey, and the meat cooks on a horizontal spit rather than the vertical one used for doner.

Şehzade Cağ Kebap is one of the very few places in Istanbul serving a genuinely authentic version. The kitchen uses high-quality meat and prepares it with care, so every skewer arrives worth the trip.

Homemade Turkish yogurt, desserts, and salads round out the menu.

8. Hafız Mustafa 1864

Hafız Mustafa is one of the oldest names on this list. Founded in 1864, during the Ottoman period, it has focused on a single category ever since: Turkish desserts.

Baklava, kadayıf, and the milky desserts are all made fresh, and they appeal to the eye as much as the stomach. The main branch sits in Sultanahmet, with locations across town, so stop at whichever one is closest to your hotel.

Talk with the staff and they can prepare Âfet-i Devrân, which translates as the “beauty of the century”: baklava served with water buffalo clotted cream and Turkish goat’s-milk ice cream.

9. Güvenç Konyalı

Konya was one of the food capitals of the Ottoman Empire, and its kitchen has shaped Turkish cooking with its range of flavors and spices.

The city’s signature dish is etliekmek, similar to pide but with a much thinner crust, and Güvenç Konyalı bakes one of the best you will find in Istanbul.

The menu also covers traditional Turkish soups, kebabs, and salads. Founded in 2011, this is the youngest restaurant on the list, and it has earned its popularity on the strength of its Konya cooking.

10. Giritli Restaurant

Giritli welcomes its guests into a restored old Sultanahmet house. Girit is the Turkish name for Crete, and the owner and chef, Ayşe Şensılay, is a proud descendant of the island. Her grandfather was born and raised there, and that heritage still shapes her menu today.

The kitchen leans on fresh seafood and Mediterranean cooking, including dozens of wild greens grown in the Aegean region that you will rarely see elsewhere.

If you are looking for an authentic dinner in Sultanahmet, book a table here. The menu has something for everyone.

11. Pandeli Restaurant

Pandeli sits inside the famous Spice Bazaar in Eminönü, which makes it an easy stop since the bazaar is probably on your sightseeing list already. It is also one of the oldest dining rooms in the area.

The menu runs past 70 dishes: chicken, fish, beef, and lamb, with plenty of vegetarian choices, from soups and salads through mains and desserts, with Turkish coffee to finish. Whatever your tastes or dietary restrictions, the kitchen has you covered.

12. Bitlisli

Bitlis is a city in eastern Turkey famous for its local cooking, and Bitlisli brings some of the best of Southeast and East Anatolian cuisine to Sultanahmet.

Fair warning: Southeast Anatolia likes its food spicy. If you are a spice lover, the kebabs here will be right up your alley.

The menu is broad, covering kebabs, pide, and lahmacun, including sarımsaklı Antep lahmacun, a garlic version of the thin flatbread.

13. Balkan Lokantası

Lokanta is the Turkish word for an everyday restaurant, and the esnaf lokantası is its tradesman’s form, with steam trays of home-style dishes cooked fresh and served canteen-style. Balkan Lokantası on Hoca Paşa Sokak in Sirkeci, a few minutes’ walk from Sultanahmet, is one of the best places near the Old City to try it.

The format is self-service. You point at whatever looks good behind the counter, soups, stews, and pastries among them, and build your own tray. Reviewers consistently note the cheap, homestyle cooking and the local lunchtime crowd that fills the room. It is an easy way to eat like locals do during your Istanbul visit.

The doors stay open long hours, roughly from 7 in the morning until 11 at night, and diners report there is still good variety on the trays even at 9 pm.

14. Deraliye

Deraliye serves Ottoman cuisine next to Hagia Sophia, and the menu draws on dishes once cooked for the Ottoman sultans. Two things keep it popular with locals and visitors alike: the food itself, and the cooking classes that teach you to make traditional Turkish dishes yourself.

The location is hard to beat. Most of Sultanahmet’s major sites are a short walk from the table, so it slots easily into a day of sightseeing.

Final words

These 14 restaurants cover the full spread of what the Old City does well: köfte from a kitchen that has served it since 1920, Ottoman palace dishes beside Hagia Sophia, steam-tray lunches in Sirkeci, and a dessert counter that has worked since 1864. For more of the city, neighborhood by neighborhood, start with our Istanbul neighborhood food guides.

And if you would rather eat your way across both sides of the city in a single day, our Taste of Two Continents tour starts with breakfast near the Spice Market and crosses the Bosphorus by ferry to Kadıköy. We have run it since 2013, with groups capped at 10 guests.