Best food in Kuşadası: what to order, and when

Ask anyone from this coast what makes the food different and they will talk about otlar: the wild greens that grow on the hillsides and end up on the meze table. Ot kavurması, a sauté of mixed greens, is the one to try first. Şevketi bostan, made from thistle stalks, is the one people are proudest of. Radika and arapsaçı, chicory and wild fennel, arrive boiled and cold under olive oil and lemon.

They are seasonal in a way the rest of the menu is not. From roughly February to May the herb mezes are at their best and a good kitchen will have several; in August you may be offered none at all. If you are here in spring and you order only fish, you have missed the most local thing on the table.

Whole fish is almost always sold by weight, not per portion. The menu shows a price per kilo, you choose your fish, and it is weighed before cooking. This is completely normal and it is also where surprise bills come from, because a large sea bass can weigh far more than you expect.

The fix is simple and nobody will mind you asking: have the fish weighed in front of you, and confirm both the price per kilo and the weight before it goes on the grill. Ask which fish is in season and which is wild rather than farmed, and expect wild to cost noticeably more. Grilled is the default and usually the best treatment.

A proper meal here is ordered in waves, not courses. Cold mezes come first and cover the table: olive oil vegetables, herb dishes, yoghurt dips, lakerda. Then a few hot mezes, often fried calamari or prawns in a clay dish. The fish arrives last, shared, when everyone has already been eating for an hour.

Rakı is poured into a tall thin glass, then topped with water, which turns it cloudy, and ice goes in last to stop it curdling. It is a drink for a long evening with food, not for a quick round. If you would rather not, the same table works perfectly with cold white wine or just water.

A serpme kahvaltı arrives as a dozen or more small plates: white cheese and aged cheeses, green and black olives, tomato and cucumber, butter and honey, several jams, eggs cooked in a pan with tomato or sucuk, fresh bread, and tea that keeps coming until you say stop.

It is also the best value meal of the day and it is served late, so it suits a slow morning rather than an early Ephesus departure. If your tour collects you at seven, eat breakfast at the hotel and save the long version for a free day.

In the evenings the harbour and the bazaar edges fill with stalls selling midye dolma, stuffed mussels eaten one after another from the shell, and corn and roasted chestnuts later in the year. Dondurma, the thick stretchy ice cream, is sold by the scoop and by theatre.

Finish with baklava or künefe and a Turkish coffee, ordered by sweetness rather than size: sade for none, orta for medium, şekerli for sweet. Let the grounds settle before you drink, and do not drain the cup.

The pattern is consistent anywhere on the Mediterranean. A tourist menu has photographs of the food, eight languages, laminated pages, someone outside inviting you in, and a very long list of dishes that could not all be fresh. A local kitchen has a short menu, a handwritten board of what came in that morning, and Turkish spoken at most of the tables.

Walking two or three streets back from the water usually changes the prices and the cooking. Lunch is the easiest test: if a place is full of people who are clearly working nearby, order whatever they are having from the counter display.