Eat Well

Ankara's two dinner streets: Filistin Caddesi and 7. Cadde

One for a proper night out in the embassy quarter, one for cheap plates and cafés with the Bahçelievler students — learn both and you've learned how the city eats.

₺₺an eveningdinner from 8pm; 7. Cadde any time from breakfast

Save for later — join Smileys

Why do it?

Ankara doesn't have a single restaurant district; it has streets. Filistin Caddesi in Gaziosmanpaşa — GOP, the neighbourhood above Kavaklıdere where the embassies and the ambassadors' residences are — is the grown-up one: a long avenue of restaurants doing Anatolian, Italian, Levantine and Turkish grill at mid-range prices, with terraces and a crowd that dresses for dinner. Across the city in Bahçelievler, 7. Cadde (formally Aşkabat Caddesi) is the opposite: a pedestrianised strip of cafés, cheap grill and pide houses, dessert shops and bars, kept alive by the students from nearby campuses and the families who have lived in Bahçelievler since it was a garden suburb in the 1930s. It runs from breakfast to past midnight and costs a fraction of GOP.

The Smileys Take

Use them differently. Filistin is where we book a table for a Smileys dinner of six or eight — quiet enough to talk, good enough to impress a visitor, and a ten-minute taxi from Kavaklıdere. 7. Cadde is the everyday one: meet for a çay, stay for a plate of something, move on to a bar, spend little. Both are honest about what they are, which is why we like them more than the malls. Try to keep to independent places rather than chains on either street; the city has plenty of the latter already. And a caution about Filistin: Ankara's dining scene turns over fast, so ask a local what's good this year rather than trusting a two-year-old list.